


Seaside Towns

by AconitumNapellus



Series: Seaside Towns [1]
Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Cambridge, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Holiday, M/M, Napollya - Freeform, Nostalgia, Slash, Vacation, Wales
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-07
Updated: 2017-02-07
Packaged: 2018-09-22 16:48:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 42,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9616607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AconitumNapellus/pseuds/AconitumNapellus
Summary: Napoleon and Illya are on holiday together in Wales, but the surroundings bring back memories for Illya of a past, lost, love.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I really wanted to write a story where Napoleon and Illya visited my home, so here it is. I wish I'd had them visit more places. The only place I haven't been in the Welsh parts of this story is Rhyl Funfair (and inside the camera obscura.)
> 
> Thank you so, so, so much to the amazing beta readers from Tumblr who gave me so much help. It was so very appreciated.
> 
> Welsh place names Conwy and Caernarfon are spelt Conway and Caernarvon here, as they were Anglicised in the sixties.

1959

  


The glass of the window was so cold against Illya’s forehead that his skull ached. The aching spread through and around to the back of his head. His eyes were hot and dry. His eyes ached too. His arms. His legs. Every bone was a separate thing, distinct, aching. Every vertebra was a bead on a string, aching, the little islands of his bones pushing at his skin, pushing at his neck. He was so tired that he just wanted to fall onto a soft mattress, but he couldn’t stay here.

Behind him Philip was a landmass lying asleep on the bed. Socked feet. Shoulders. Hip. His body was dark and soft and the only light that lit him was the moonlight from the window, shining on him because Illya had pushed the curtain aside so he could see to pack his things. At Illya’s feet his case stood filled and closed, and he was so tired, but he couldn’t stay here. He couldn’t stand to think of Philip stirring, opening his eyes, saying Illya’s name. If he said his name he would be undone.

He stood there in the hotel room, head against the glass, watching the glitter on the water, watching the foaming waves sinking onto the shore. The room smelt of Philip. Everything was Philip. His heart was falling apart. He wanted to turn back to the bed, to kneel on the carpet as if he were saying his prayers, to kiss Philip’s fingertips, his forehead, his parted lips. He wanted to make a prayer of his kisses and send it off to a god he had never believed in, and find himself saved.

But there was no way to be saved. There was no god. This was the place where the British lost their God, where Mary Anning trawled the shore and plucked out the fossilised evidence of deep time. This was where men stood and looked out over the endless sea and realised there was no more to life than that; the waves, the shore, the stones, and harsh, truncated lives. The only afterlife was in the fossils, curled and hidden inside flaking stone, washed out millennia later by the relentless sea to try men’s faith.

He picked up his suitcase and tightened his hand. He put his key softly on the night stand, and left the room like a thief, slipping silent through the dim passages until he opened the front door onto the night and tasted the salt air again. The street lay before him, black and silver in the moonlight, and he stepped onto the pavement and walked away.

  


((O))

  


1968

  


Another hotel room. This time the twin beds were covered in pale blue; not satin, but satiny, something synthetic, both identical. It pleased Napoleon strangely when the beds were so very identical. The bedspreads matched the Wedgwood décor, the delicate blue walls and the white plaster flounces. There was a blue and white vase of flowers on the night stand between the beds, and blue lamps with white shades. The flowers were shades of yellow and orange; marigolds, Napoleon thought. He plucked a petal from one of the blossoms and put it in his mouth. Illya looked disgusted.

‘They’re edible,’ Napoleon grinned, and offered a petal.

‘I’m not  _ that  _ hungry,’ Illya replied.

Napoleon’s case was on the rack at the end of his bed, Illya’s at the foot of the other. Illya’s case was slightly battered, square edged, a brown leather effect on what was probably cardboard. Napoleon’s was modern, round edged, hard. He wondered sometimes if he might be able to arrange an ‘accident’ for Illya’s case just so he could upgrade it to something more suited to an international agent. His pay packet was certainly large enough. But Illya wouldn’t change, hated change.

‘Besides, you don’t know where they’ve  _ been _ ,’ Illya said. He was still harping on the flowers.

‘Turning their faces to the sun,  _ mon ami _ ,’ Napoleon smiled. ‘Just as we should be.’

Napoleon threw himself full length on the bed, kicked off his shoes, wiggled his toes in thin black socks. He revelled in his own ability to be instantly at home when it was juxtaposed against Illya’s awkwardness. Illya needed to use the bathroom, to order up a drink, to sit there for a while, before he could start to relax in each new hotel room. Napoleon just shrugged the place on like a new coat, and was happy. In a few minutes Illya would probably be outside familiarising himself with escape routes for fire, hazard, or attack. Napoleon would let him do that, meticulously, and then Illya would come back in and go through the routes thoroughly with Napoleon so when something happened, as it did too often, they could both get out as quickly and efficiently as possible. Meanwhile, Napoleon would scour the room service menu with similar diligence and pick out what he thought Illya would like to eat. It was a good division of labour. It worked.

‘Most people don’t eat the decorations in their hotel rooms,’ Illya said.

‘Ever eaten the parsley on a fish supper?’

Illya snorted.

So Napoleon lounged, arms folded behind his head, as Illya stalked across the room, into the bathroom, out again; as Illya checked the sash windows to be sure they opened, crossed to the door, then went out into the corridor. A few minutes later there was a tentative knock, and Napoleon grinned. He padded over to the door in his socks, opened it.

‘Forgot my key,’ Illya said rather shamefacedly, ‘but I’ve checked the exits, Napoleon. There’s a window at the end of the hall there with a rather sturdy iron drainpipe. Should be easy enough to shinny down. Conversely it’ll be easy for someone to shinny up.’

‘Why would they, when they can use the door?’ Napoleon pointed out, and Illya gave him a look. ‘Well, we’re on vacation, Illya,’ Napoleon continued with an expansive shrug. ‘There’s no reason for Thrush to be on our trail and no reason to prowl the place as if we’re in constant danger.’

‘We’re  _ always _ in danger,’ Illya growled, and Napoleon grinned affectionately.

‘Well, that’s what keeps us alive.’

‘Hmm,’ Illya responded. ‘Inasmuch as one is never more alive than when one is a moment away from death.’

‘You’re a bundle of laughs,’ Napoleon huffed. ‘Maybe I’ll ask that pretty receptionist to the pictures tonight instead of you.’

‘We won’t have time for the pictures tonight,’ Illya glowered, and Napoleon grinned.

‘Look, Illya,’ he said, picking up the menu and pointing at it. ‘Beef stroganoff. You’ll enjoy that. And I’ve heard amazing things about the desserts here.’

‘They call them puddings,’ Illya said, but he looked at the menu nevertheless, and as Napoleon watched a sliver of pink tongue slipped past his lips, and licked. Illya’s mouth was watering, and Napoleon felt his job was done.

  


((O))

  


It was only when Illya was properly settled into the room that he was happy to leave. If this were a mission he’d be ready to drop everything on a moment’s notice, but this was different. He knew his escape routes, he had a fair idea of the guests in the rooms around theirs, he had familiarised himself with the faces of the on duty staff, and knew the quickest ways out of their room, the dining room, and the hotel lounge. And then he acceded to Napoleon’s plea of, ‘Aw, come on, Illya. We’ve only got a week and I want to make the most of the first day. Who knows when Waverly’s going to gate-crash our party with that horrible beep, beep, beep?’

So Illya sighed and nodded, and changed into a polo shirt and slacks, slipped his wallet into his pocket, and felt a moment of regret that he couldn’t carry his gun. They both  _ had _ their guns, of course. They always did, and their U.N.C.L.E. IDs gave them special dispensation to bring them into the country, but the laws wouldn’t allow for them to carry them without definite reason.

‘Well, are you ready?’ he growled at Napoleon, and Napoleon batted him on the arm and said, ‘Cheer up,  _ tovarisch _ . You’re on vacation.’

‘Hmm,’ Illya said, and followed his partner out of the room, down the stairs, and into the early evening light and salt-tinged air of the sea front. ‘Well, what are we supposed to  _ do _ here?’ he asked irritably.

He would be irritable for the first day. He knew that. He knew that Napoleon knew that. Napoleon would feed him up, cajole him, try to make him settle in. And then he would be at home. He would be eager to strike out, to get to know the place. But right now, it made him nervous. Who knew that Thrush weren’t hiding just around that corner? Who knew there wasn’t the barrel of a gun poking through a high window? Just to be sure, he glanced around, and Napoleon laughed and slung an arm around his neck.

‘Illya, what would our enemies want with a little town in North Wales?’ he asked.

‘They don’t want the town. They want  _ us _ ,’ Illya growled.

But it was surprisingly warm, and the waves were rolling in with languid ease, flopping over onto the sand as if they were unbearably wearied by their journey from the deep ocean. A few people were out there in the water, in black bathing suits, and Illya suddenly remembered with a burst of joy the sight of large old Ukrainian women plunging into the shallows of the Black Sea, lounging in the water like whales, and then coming out and plastering themselves with mud that was supposed to be good for the skin. He remembered the feel of it himself, scooping up handfuls and slicking it over his body. He wondered what Napoleon would say to that. He laughed out loud, because he was sure Napoleon would never believe it of him. But, oh, it felt good, and it smelt good, strangely, that earthy, sulphurous smell. He had never felt so clean as after those holidays down on the edge of the Black Sea, when he had plastered himself in mud and then washed it off.

‘Whatcha laughing at, partner?’ Napoleon asked. The sun was quite low in the sky and it left gold highlights in his dark hair.

‘Oh, memories,’ Illya said cryptically.

‘Hmm?’

‘Just memories,’ Illya shrugged.

And Napoleon glanced sidelong at him with that look in his eyes, that penetrating, curious look.

‘Why do you never tell me anything about yourself, Illya?’ he asked. ‘Huh? Why don’t you trust me with your past?’

Illya shrugged. It wasn’t a question of trust. But his past was long and convoluted, with so many parts. Which bits should he choose to unfold and reveal? To Napoleon talking came easily, but Illya found it so much harder.

‘After the war,’ he said, ‘when everything settled down, a couple of times I went with my parents down to _Chorne_ _More_ – to the Black Sea. It’s a very good holiday destination. A lot of Ukrainians go there. It’s hot, and it’s – well, it’s nice, you know. Just nice.’

‘Hmm,’ Napoleon said, but Illya could see that he appreciated Illya giving him that sliver of his life. ‘You know, I can’t quite picture you sunbathing. How blond did that hair go, huh?’

And Illya grinned. ‘When I was very young sometimes it was almost white. I don’t remember, but my mother tells me so. But not so much when I was older. And I didn’t sunbathe exactly.’

There. He had piqued Napoleon’s interest.

‘Exactly?’ Napoleon asked, his eyebrow twitching.

‘The mud there is very wholesome,’ Illya said. ‘Very good for the skin. There are whole bath houses where one can bathe in mud, but the canny just scoop it up from the shore and cover themselves in it.’

And then Napoleon snorted, and Illya knew that he was picturing the scene; the lanky, skinny teenaged Illya covered in mud.

‘You?’ he asked. ‘Really? You, Illya?’

And Illya grinned. ‘Me. Really. I’ll take you there one day. You can try it.’

Napoleon moved to straighten his tie, but he was in a polo shirt too, and his hand touched the skin at the base of his neck instead. He jerked his shoulders a little and wrinkled his nose.

‘I stopped making mud pies when I was six.’

Illya looked at him. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said, but he did, really. It was hard to imagine Napoleon elbow deep in mud. ‘Well, what about you? Did you ever take beach holidays as a kid?’

‘Well, I – ’

‘Oh, come on, Napoleon. I’ve told you something about my childhood.’

‘You didn’t exactly give me the keys to Fort Knox. Yes, we had some vacations at the beach, some sailing, a couple of tours in Europe before the war. Mostly we just went to our cabin on the lake.’

Somehow Illya never got the impression that Napoleon’s childhood was as happy as his. Not that Napoleon was unhappy, certainly, and Napoleon’s childhood couldn’t have been cut through with the same horrors that Illya experienced in occupied Kyiv, but just that he didn’t have the same peaks of joy that Illya experienced. Napoleon’s upbringing was privileged, well off. Illya’s parents were far more average, not really struggling but not finding everything lubricated by money either. But still, Illya got the feeling that in general he was happier.

‘Any mud baths?’ he asked, arching an eyebrow at Napoleon.

That made Napoleon laugh. ‘I – er – I remember getting buried up to the neck in sand by my cousins one year,’ he said. ‘But I’ve never bathed in mud.’

They had been walking steadily along the promenade, which curved gracefully for two miles or more between the two great rocky headlands that the locals called  _ ormes _ . Illya looked at them and wondered at the geological processes that had built up great slabs of limestone in the Carboniferous era and then left behind those two lumps of rock as deep time scoured the landscape into contours like driftwood.

The town was so flat and so low that he couldn’t help but think that a high tide would swamp it. The original town, such as it was, clung to the side of the greater Orme, little houses in terraces which were dwarfed by more luxurious detached homes. The modern town, Victorian in origin, was built on a marsh. For all of the tarmac, concrete, brick, and Victorian grandeur, it all sat on sand.

‘There’s a camera obscura up there,’ Illya mentioned, nodding at a little building partway up on the rocky Orme. Brightly coloured cable cars swung from tense wires, resonant against the evening blue of the sky.

‘Oh, I thought we could take a stroll up the pier,’ Napoleon suggested.

For a moment they were at an impasse. Napoleon wanted the genteel stroll. Illya would be happy to forge up the steep side of the hill and investigate the camera obscura. And then Illya felt himself soften and said, ‘All right, Napoleon. The pier,’ and the light that brightened Napoleon’s face was worth it.

‘You know, they have amusement arcades all the way down.’

‘They are cons,’ Illya said darkly. ‘They only exist to part fools from their money.’

‘They have doughnuts,’ Napoleon mentioned then. ‘And ice cream.’

‘Ah, well...’

The thought of fresh doughnuts was much better than dropping pennies into coin-eating machines. Napoleon put his arm back around Illya’s shoulders, and Illya made himself relax. It was easier to relax with Napoleon so close and happy. There were other people wandering on to the long board walk. Couples and families, and groups of teenagers caught in that awkward moment between childhood and self-conscious adulthood. Illya wondered for a moment how conspicuous they were, one dark-haired American and one blond Russian; although if he tried he could make himself sound quite English. He thought about Thrush again, and a hundred other enemies that they had, but then Napoleon caught sight of something and rushed to the ornate cast iron rails that sided the pier, and Illya hurried to follow him.

For a moment he wondered what he had seen, but then he followed Napoleon’s gaze, and grinned. On a jetty that stuck out between green-slimed rocks into the water, scaring black and white oystercatchers and bolder seagulls into the air, was a group of five nuns, holding each other by the arms, laughing, getting as close as they could to the water without slipping on the treacherous planks.

‘I wish I’d brought my camera,’ Napoleon said.

And then one of the nuns fell straight on her behind, and the others clustered round her like anxious hens, and Illya had to turn away to hide a sacrilegious smile.

‘Come on,’ Napoleon said, and a few minutes later he had managed to get hold of a brown paper bag of doughnuts, the paper shiny with grease. He offered it up to Illya. ‘There. Let that soothe the savage breast.’

‘My breast is hardly savage,’ Illya objected, but he took one, greasy and scattered with sugar, and bit into it. Since it was the first thing he had eaten since lunch in Euston Station it tasted delicious. He stood there and diligently ate every bit of the doughnut, then licked each finger in turn. Then he became aware that Napoleon was just standing there watching him, a look of wonder on his face, as if he were feeding peanuts to the elephants at the zoo.

‘Something amuses you?’ he asked archly.

Napoleon reached out a finger and brushed Illya’s cheek.

‘I’ve never seen anyone get so sugary while eating doughnuts,’ he said. ‘Your lips look like the rim of a cocktail glass.’

Illya frowned, and Napoleon explained quickly, ‘Uh, you know, like when you dip the rim of your glass in sugar? You don’t know?’

‘You obviously lead a far more exciting life than I,’ Illya said, using his dour-Russian persona, although part of him wished he were as worldly as Napoleon.

‘Well, I wonder if there’s anywhere around here that does cocktails...’ Napoleon mused.

‘I doubt it,’ Illya replied.

‘Tomorrow we’ll go look at your camera obscura,’ Napoleon promised, ‘and we’ll take one of those cable cars to the top of the mountain.’

‘There is also a tram,’ Illya told him, ‘which is technically a cable car too, just like the ones in San Francisco.’

‘Well, all right, cable car up, tram cable car down. Illya, did you read an entire six volumes on this place before we left?’

Illya regarded him. ‘I like to be prepared.’

‘Like any good boy scout,’ Napoleon said, but then he dragged Illya into an amusement arcade and Illya resigned himself to the clattering, jangling, busy noises. He hovered at Napoleon’s side as he pushed coins into various machines and came back with nothing. On a whim, Illya dropped a farthing into a machine with a whole shelf of coins that would be pushed into the tray if you were lucky; and Illya  _ was  _ lucky. The coins were pushed, and a slew of copper tumbled into the tray. So Illya grinned and fished it out, and straightened up to see Napoleon looking at him, askance.

‘Humph,’ Napoleon said. He plucked sixpence from Illya’s hand and put it into another machine, one where you had to manipulate a grabber to catch a toy. The claw descended, clamped around the head of a koala bear with enormous eyes. Triumphant, Napoleon manoeuvred it to the opening.

‘ _ Pour toi, mon cher _ ,’ Napoleon said, presenting it to Illya with a wonderful smile.

Illya accepted the disgusting thing and shoved it into the crook of his arm, but he couldn’t help smiling at the joy on Napoleon’s face.

‘I don’t believe anyone’s ever won a soft toy for me before,’ he remarked.

‘I should have taken you down to Coney Island years ago,’ Napoleon said. He stopped suddenly, looking stricken. ‘Illya, why have I never taken you to Coney Island? You’d love it there. The lights, the rides...’

And Illya realised that Napoleon really was upset that he had never done this thing. Napoleon truly regretted never having thought to take his friend to this place.

‘I’ve been to funfairs,’ he assured Napoleon, remembering a few of his childhood, and one sparkling experience of a travelling fair in Cambridge, of rides and stalls and candy floss and hooking ducks from a shallow pool and his first experience of shooting, aiming a beaten up rifle at targets and discovering he was a surprisingly good shot. He had won trinkets and tokens that were so little use to him, and had pressed them into the hands of his friend. He had sent a ball spinning straight at the coconut at the coconut shy, and Philip had stared at him and immediately pressed him to join the Trinity cricket team, because they’d never had a fast bowler who could bowl quite like that.

‘Have you been to Coney Island?’ Napoleon asked, and Illya could tell that to Napoleon that was the be all and end all, the final word in funfairs.

Illya smiled, still remembering the lights and music and joy of that fair in Cambridge as the sun sank and the whole place came alive.

‘No, I’ve never found the opportunity,’ he admitted.

‘Then I’ll take you there,’ Napoleon promised. ‘First chance we get. You’ll love it.’

And Illya knew that he would love it. Much as chaos and chatter and noise unsettled him, it also enlivened him, and he would let Napoleon take him around the place and spoil him rotten, and it would be a perfect night.

‘Come on,’ Napoleon said, and took him back out into the warm evening air, and they strolled on down the pier, their shoes making hollow sounds on the wind-scoured boards, until they reached the end, where a few boys and men had fishing lines trailing down into the water. They stood and gazed out over the rippling sea.

‘Liverpool’s over there,’ Napoleon said, pointing at the haze on the horizon, ‘and the Isle of Man probably over there somewhere, and Ireland beyond.’

Illya gave him a look, and Napoleon said, ‘What? You think you’re the only one who can look at a map?’

Just then a boy reeled in a fish and it sailed, glittering and flopping, silver-scaled, onto the wooden boards.

‘Hey!’ Napoleon said in appreciation, clapping his hands together. Illya watched the fish as it flopped and gaped and suffocated in the air, and felt a sliver of sympathy.

‘Come on,’ he said, clutching his koala a little tighter under his arm, and nudging Napoleon away from the fishermen to another part of the rail.

There were a few boats out there on the silky water, and the final bathers were wading back to shore, wrapping towels around their shoulders, laughing and gasping.

‘Fancy it, huh?’ Napoleon asked playfully. ‘I bet it’s colder than the Black Sea.’

‘I’ll just bet it is,’ Illya agreed with a shiver.

  


((O))

  


The evening was really drawing in when Napoleon finally ushered Illya off the pier and back into the town. The sun was low in the west, sending golden rays and long tongues of dark shadow down the straight streets. Illya’s hair looked like polished copper whenever it caught the light. They strolled down the main street, idly looking into the windows of the closed shops, while seagulls cried in the air and a couple of cars passed.

‘Quiet place, isn’t it?’ Illya remarked.

‘Oh, lookit there,’ Napoleon said suddenly, seeing the bright neon sign of a restaurant on a street corner. ‘Tribels Fish and Chips. That’s our dinner, Illya, right there!’

Illya looked slightly disgruntled. ‘I thought I was having beef stroganoff in the hotel restaurant, and one of their amazing desserts?’

‘I’ll tell you what,’ Napoleon tried to mollify him. ‘We’ll have fish and chips then go back and order dessert up to the room. How about that?’

Illya looked suspiciously at the red and blue of the neon sign and thrust his thumbs through his belt loops. Napoleon wondered what it would take to stop Illya being suspicious of  _ everything.  _ But then he nodded and said, ‘All right. It’s a deal. Have you ever had mushy peas, Napoleon?’

‘Mushy – er – ’ Napoleon shook his head, thinking it sounded disgusting.

‘Try them,’ Illya urged him, and Napoleon wasn’t sure whether to be suspicious or not.

So they sat down at a formica table and Napoleon grinned as Illya ordered battered cod, chips with gravy, mushy peas, a battered sausage on the side, and a plate of bread and butter and a pot of tea. The waitress looked amazed and then said, ‘Well, if you can eat all that you can have the sausage for free, del,’ and Illya raised his eyebrows and Napoleon said, ‘Oh, he’ll eat it. I’ll just have the plaice and chips, please.’ Then at Illya’s look he said, ‘Oh, and mushy peas too, I guess. And tea. Thank you.’

‘American?’ the girl asked, looking at him appraisingly, and Napoleon gave her one of his most dazzling smiles.

‘Why, yes. New York as a matter of fact. Have you ever been to New York, miss?’

And she laughed and cocked her head sideways and fiddled with her hair and said, ‘I’ve never even been to Chester, del.’

‘Well, if you ever get to New York I’d be _ very _ pleased to give you a guided tour,’ Napoleon said. ‘A  _ personal _ guided tour.’

‘And what would Nancy say to that?’ Illya asked darkly.

‘Illya, I swear – ’ Napoleon began as the waitress walked away. ‘Anyone would think you’re jealous.’

‘Me? I’m known as the monk of U.N.C.L.E.,’ Illya replied with a shrug. ‘Why would I be jealous?’

And Napoleon just looked at him as he dropped his blue gaze to the table and started to trace his finger over the patterns on the formica. Illya puzzled him sometimes. Hell, Illya puzzled him a  _ lot _ of the time. The amount of times Illya said something to put a woman off Napoleon were countless, but he never made an effort to go after the women himself. But Napoleon couldn’t help flirting. He didn’t even realise he was doing it most of the time. It was just the way he was. It struck him that perhaps Illya was just jealous for his attention. He didn’t have many friends; certainly not friends that he took holidays with, dined with every other day, trusted his life with on regular occasions. He never got the sense that Illya was suffering because of this, but still, perhaps sometimes he was lonely. So Napoleon decided to make an effort this time to keep his eyes off the women and just give Illya his time.

‘All right,  _ tovarisch _ ,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’ll leave the pretty girls of Wales alone. I only have eyes for you.’

And Illya made a face, but still, Napoleon thought he looked pleased. And when the food came Illya ate every scrap, and he was given the sausage for free, and he was satisfied because not only had he eaten well, but he had saved money too.

‘Well,  _ I’ve _ saved money,’ Napoleon said as he opened his wallet and scrutinised the cash inside. He fanned out some notes on the table, and frowned at them, then Illya leant in and deftly picked out the correct coins and notes. Sometimes he forgot that Illya lived in England for longer than he had yet lived in America.

‘How did you find the peas?’ Illya asked him, and Napoleon glanced down at the remains on his plate.

‘Well, I found them, anyway,’ Napoleon said, ‘but I’m not sure that I’d revisit.’

‘You didn’t like them?’ Illya sounded shocked, his eyes wide.

‘Come on,’ Napoleon said, and he sauntered over to the counter and paid for their meal, then walked with Illya out into the street.

The sky was dark now, a very rich blue, and the seagulls had quietened. There were a few people out in the street, but not many. Windows were yellow with light through curtains, and in the distance he could still hear the sound of the waves crashing onto the shore. He noticed that Illya was still carrying the stuffed koala toy, and he grinned at that. He had expected the Russian to quietly ‘lose’ it somewhere, but there it was, still nestled under his arm.

‘Illya, why  _ do  _ you always warn women off me?’ he asked casually.

‘Well, don’t you have enough women?’ Illya asked, his voice becoming very dark, more Russian-accented than usual. In the restaurant he had sounded almost English.

‘Are there ever enough women?’ Napoleon asked rhetorically, but Illya answered anyway.

‘There are women everywhere, Napoleon, and after all, one can only deal with one at a time.’

‘So  _ you  _ say,’ Napoleon said suggestively, and Illya looked mildly disgusted. ‘Well, it’s like your dinner, Illya,’ Napoleon continued. ‘You didn’t just have fish. You had a sausage too. And you don’t feel bad for having that sausage, do you? You don’t feel guilty? You wanted both, so you had both.’

‘Well, I’m sure the fish didn’t feel hurt that I also had a sausage on my plate, Napoleon,’ Illya pointed out tritely.

‘If the fish and the sausage were both perfectly happy to share a plate – ’ Napoleon began.

Illya looked more pensive still, and then said, ‘Perhaps I have never really grown up, Napoleon. I never did like to share.’

He was holding the koala tighter still under his arm, squeezing it hard against his body. It was as if something were really bothering him, but Napoleon wasn’t quite sure what, because surely Illya wasn’t so uptight about the idea of having two women in one’s bed at the same time? Illya, who shocked him with prosaic revelations about how he had visited geisha houses and strolled the red light district in Amsterdam without turning a hair.

He put his hand on Illya’s arm and saw him relax, just a little.

‘I’d better get you back to the hotel and see about that dessert before the kitchen closes for orders,’ Napoleon told him. ‘What you need is a good dose of chocolate.’

  


((O))

  


And the recommendations were right. The desserts in the hotel were very good. Napoleon ordered up something amazing which was made of chocolate sponge and mousse and whipped cream and brandy, with cherries on the top, and it was an utter delight to watch Illya eating it, licking every morsel from his spoon, and licking his fingers too. Napoleon had his own bowl, but he found himself ignoring it in his fascination over how Illya could devour his dessert like that after such an enormous meal in the restaurant, apparently without even a moment of regret.

‘Napoleon, I’m starting to think you buy me food just to watch me eat,’ Illya said after a while, stopping with his spoon halfway to his mouth.

‘Well, you have to admit, it’s a pretty amazing feat of nature,’ Napoleon laughed. ‘How a man can eat so much without stopping, and still stay in shape.’

Illya lowered his spoon back down to his bowl. ‘I take exercise, Napoleon. You should try it.’

Napoleon managed to look hurt. ‘I exercise plenty!’

‘I don’t mean running away from Thrush,’ Illya said in a withering tone.

‘Huh,’ Napoleon said, turning back to his bowl and tapping his spoon lightly on the china.

They ate in silence for a while, and then Illya said, ‘Well, I  _ do _ exercise, Napoleon. I use the gym at HQ three times a week.’

‘I use the gym too,’ Napoleon commented. ‘Well, maybe not three times a week, though...’

And then he smiled, and Illya looked up from his dessert and smiled too, and his eyes seemed incredibly blue, and Napoleon grinned then because Illya had a smear of chocolate across his upper lip.

‘I always wondered what you’d look like with a moustache,’ he said, using a corner of a napkin to smudge the chocolate away. And Illya let him, and his lips filled a little at the rough touch. He looked more pouty than ever, and something flipped over in Napoleon’s stomach.

Such a strange feeling. It was something he hadn’t felt in a long time, this turning over in his stomach as if he’d just gone over the crest of a rollercoaster and was plummeting downwards at breakneck speed. He remembered feeling it about Betsy in third grade, and Martha who lived next door, and oh god did he remember having it for Sue at college. And then he remembered it for a few other people, men, feelings he had almost always denied and suppressed. Almost always...

And god, here it was now, for Illya, Illya, for god’s sake...

He dug his spoon into his bowl and scooped chocolate into his mouth, and hoped that his thoughts weren’t as transparent as they suddenly felt. Then he looked up again and caught the blue of Illya’s eyes and the blond fall of his fringe, and his stomach flopped all over again.

  


((O))

  


Illya turned back to his bowl of dessert, wondering exactly why he was behaving like this, feeling like this. He always needled Napoleon a little, but not like this. Not so constantly. And there was the strangest look on Napoleon’s face, like he’d just taken a step and found there was nothing under his feet. He couldn’t put his finger on it, didn’t know what it was. But Napoleon had shaken himself and carried on with his own food, and so Illya turned to his, scraping the bowl clean with great care.

He didn’t want to feel like this, not on the first day of his holiday, although he knew he was always unsettled for that first day. He would feel better when he had slept and woken up in this room.

He absently used his fingertip to wipe a last smear of the chocolate from the bowl, and caught Napoleon looking at him again as he licked that final taste from his finger. He put the bowl on the trolley to be cleared away.

‘I was born just after the famine,’ he said suddenly, rather defensively, giving Napoleon another piece of his past without being asked. ‘My parents were very strict about eating everything that was on one’s plate.’

‘I – didn’t know there was a famine,’ Napoleon said rather awkwardly.

Illya sighed. Just thinking about it made him feel small and tired and sad.

‘People don’t talk about it, aren’t supposed to talk about it. It was a man made famine, Napoleon. A hunger plague. There was famine everywhere, but – there is a belief that in order to pull my countrymen into line the government prevented adequate relief. Millions of people starved to death. Millions. People even ate the dead. And while my mother was expecting me, she was also starving. My father almost died in giving her his food. If they had lived in the countryside they would certainly have died.’

‘Oh,’ Napoleon said very softly. ‘I – didn’t know. I feel ashamed that I didn’t know, Illya.’

Illya shrugged, feeling awkward over Napoleon’s pity for what had been the grief of his parents and grandparents. It had been the grief of his country, but he had been born afterwards, a burbling, intense autumn baby birthed into a recovering world.

‘No one knows,’ he said. ‘You don’t talk about it. You’re not allowed to talk about it. A whole landscape of death that you are supposed to pretend never happened. Anyway, that was my parents’ trauma. For me it was the war that really made me appreciate food.’

Napoleon leant forward, his chin on his hands, so very serious and softened with compassion. ‘The war?’

‘There wasn’t a lot to eat after Kyiv was occupied,’ Illya said, looking down, hating to think about that terrible time. ‘I learnt not to pass up the chance to eat when I could.’

Napoleon’s eyes were rich with his sympathy, richer than when Illya had spoken of the deaths of millions, feeling more over Illya’s unique suffering.

‘That must have been hard, Illya,’ he said. ‘You were very young.’

Illya shrugged. ‘I suppose it has left its mark, but I was hardly crippled by it.’

‘No one’s suggesting you were,’ Napoleon said, still in that very sympathetic voice, ‘but still, it must have been hard. Uncertainty and fear make terrible bedfellows.’

Illya rested his chin on his hands, and for a moment he was back there, small and thin and scared, terrified that  _ mama _ and  _ tato _ would be taken away, that they would be shot, that – well, that anything could happen, anything within the realm of the imagination of an intelligent eight year old boy living under the rule of an occupying army. Lack of food was the least of his fears.

‘Why didn’t you evacuate?’ Napoleon asked.

Illya shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I never asked and they never told me. I think my mother felt it was important to stay, but I don’t know... Anyway, it’s all in the past,’ he said quickly. ‘It doesn’t matter any more. What shall we do tomorrow?’

And Napoleon took the hint and moved on to the subject of possible activities with graceful ease. Illya thought, sometimes, that Napoleon was like a cat. He never fell without picking himself up and preening and managing to give the impression that he meant to do it, just like that. Anyway, Illya was grateful for the change. He mooted suggestions about scaling the Orme and Napoleon said things about beaches, but Illya knew they would climb the Orme because he let Napoleon go down the pier and choose their dinner, and Napoleon was nothing if not fair.

  


((O))

  


Later, he lay in bed under the satinate bed cover, and just watched the hump of Napoleon’s body under his own covers. He made a long, dark shape in the almost-darkness like the long shape of the Orme outside. He could hear the slow shush of the waves on the shore, and every now and then the startled cry of a sea bird. The window was just a crack open, and the air tasted of salt, despite the vase of flowers a foot away, the flowers that Napoleon insisted on snacking upon. He wrinkled his nose at that. Napoleon so loved to be like that, to break all the rules and push the boundaries. He was just crazy enough to be an agent. Not so crazy that he was a liability. The perfect balance. The more he thought about it, the more Napoleon seemed perfect in every way. His foibles just made him human.

Illya turned over in bed restlessly and faced the window. There was a faint light reaching in through the crack in the curtains, and the waves kept coming, falling, coming again. If there ever were a perpetual motion machine, waves seemed to be one, even if he understood perfectly the role of the moon and the wind and heat and cold in moving the sea. King Canute was right to stand on the shore and demonstrate to his counsellors his utter inability to command the tides. The sea was slave to a much greater power than either mortal kings or some fictional god. What could disobey the laws of nature? In the end, everything was subject to inevitable fate. Waves would crash, the tide would rise and fall, entropy would work its mundane magic and lives would move on. There was nothing anyone could do.

He felt a lump rising in his throat, and he swallowed it bitterly. What could anyone do about fate? Like the circular motion of the waves, he was in a seaside hotel room again. It was only his companion who was different. Of course he had slept in hotel rooms with Napoleon countless times, and enough times within the sound of the sea. But there was something distinctive about British seaside resorts that wasn’t replicated anywhere in the world, and he had never done this with Napoleon before. Oh no. The last time he did anything similar was with Philip, a few months before he finished his doctorate, a short snatched moment of calm before the fever to finish everything off. At least, that was what it was meant to be. And the scent of the air was the same. The sound of the waves on the shore was the same. Even the hotel fronts and the people and the restaurants and shop fronts were practically the same, even if the accents were different. No, there was very little to distinguish one British seaside town from another, much as they liked to try to distinguish themselves with gimmicks and ploys. He should have thought of that before they booked.

He turned back and watched Napoleon’s form again. He thought he was sleeping. Illya would have half liked to push up out of bed and walk out of the hotel, just walk on the promenade in the dark, listen to the waves and feel the wind. He was restless, and he shouldn’t be restless. He had spent hours on a plane and then on a train and he should have been exhausted, but a touch of jet lag was making him feel as if it were earlier than it was and his body was just keyed up, filled up with memories and uncertainty and anticipation. Napoleon had shaken the entire journey off, settled into his new surroundings, and gone to sleep like a cat. Illya envied him.

He remembered the hotel room in that other seaside resort, Philip a long shape under the bedclothes, Illya unable to quite settle while Philip slept an easy sleep. He remembered standing at the window, looking out, and then finally shedding his clothes, dropping them on a chair, slipping under the covers and joining Philip. He had fitted his body warmly against the length of Philip’s spine, legs against his legs, an arm over his shoulder. Philip breathed out warm breath in his sleep that touched Illya’s hand, and he had thought how perfect this was. How perfect life could be, life  _ would  _ be, if only they could live like this without the judging eyes of the world. Because really, who should care that one man loved another? Who did that hurt?

Memories hurt. It was odd how very much a simple memory could hurt. But all pain lived in the brain, of course. Whether it was mental or physical, the only place you could truly feel it was in the brain. And Illya’s brain was moving like a nest of snakes. Even the warm and pleasant memories were edged with pain.

He got up and stalked to the window, stood there with his hands on the sill, head between the edges of the curtain, forehead resting on the cold glass. All of the street lamps were dark and the sea was a dark silk, invisible but gently surging in waves on the shore. He stood there for a long time, letting the shush in his ears drive tangled thoughts from his mind. And then bed springs creaked, and Napoleon said, ‘Illya?’

‘Go back to sleep, Napoleon,’ he said, keeping his forehead against the cool glass.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. I just don’t feel like sleeping.’

‘Silly Russian,’ Napoleon said affectionately, his voice heavy with sleep. ‘Anyone ever told you humans aren’t nocturnal?’

‘I think I drank too much coffee,’ Illya said.

‘Probably jet lag. You’re not going to get over it standing there. Come back to bed. I’ll sing you a lullaby.’

Illya snorted. ‘Napoleon, I don’t find torture conducive to sleep.’

‘Humph,’ Napoleon said in a hurt tone.

Illya stood up straight, closed the curtain tightly across the sliver of light from the sky, felt his way back to the bed. He slipped under the covers and lay there with his arms straight and his legs straight. He closed his eyes, willed himself to sleep. And then Napoleon started softly humming the Brahms’ Lullaby, and Illya had to smile. Strangely enough, it helped him to drift off to sleep.

  


((O))

  


In the morning, Napoleon watched Illya across the small table for two as the landlady deposited a full English breakfast in front of him and walked away to fetch a pot of tea. Illya launched into the food as if he hadn’t eaten for days, and Napoleon smiled. Illya seemed more at ease this morning, just as he had expected. Sleeping and waking always helped him settle in.

‘So, we’re going to walk up your rock this morning, huh?’ Napoleon asked.

Illya’s hand was resting on a slim guide book, and at Napoleon’s words he opened it to a bookmark, and then flicked on a few pages, a light in his eyes that Napoleon recognised well.

‘Oh, Napoleon, the rare plants and the antiquities and the geology – did you know the Orme plays host to a herd of Kashmir goats given by Queen Victoria?’

Napoleon lifted an eyebrow. ‘Well, I bet the good gardeners of the town love that.’

And Illya glanced up and smiled almost shyly, a most endearing look.

‘I’ve heard sometimes they can be a nuisance. But still… There’s a neolithic burial chamber up there, and sheets of fossils – crinoids and corals from the Carboniferous era, and – ’

Napoleon held up his hands in surrender. ‘You can tell me all about it when we’re on our way. I get the feeling I’m going to need a full stomach for this...’

And he did, because as soon as they had eaten Illya grabbed a rucksack and map and his guide book and insisted on starting on their way up the great rock without any more prevarication.

‘Now, look, let’s make a compromise,’ Napoleon said as they headed towards the camera obscura.

‘What kind of a compromise?’ Illya asked suspiciously.

‘We take the cable cars up and do our exploring on the way down. How does that strike you, huh? There’s a restaurant at the top. I’ll buy you lunch.’

It was the promise of lunch that really seemed to sway Illya. They went into the camera obscura and Illya marvelled at the view of the bay projected onto the table in the round, dark building. Then Napoleon led him back out into the dazzling light and paid for two on the cable cars, one way.

‘Do you trust these, Napoleon?’ Illya asked as the car jerked and started to sway as it trundled free of the station and started to climb into the air. He poked his fingers at a spot of rust. The noise of the cables hummed through the whole frame of the car.

‘Do I have any choice?’ Napoleon asked.

The car stayed close to the ground for a minute, but then suddenly swayed out over a high drop. Napoleon clenched his hands on the edge of the seat, looking down at the tree tops in the gully below.

‘Afraid of heights, Napoleon? You?’ Illya asked playfully.

‘Ah, it’s not heights I’m afraid of,’ Napoleon said grimly. ‘It’s hitting the ground.’

‘Oh, these things have been running for years,’ Illya said.

‘Weren’t you the one asking me a moment ago if I trusted them?’ Napoleon objected.

Illya grinned. ‘Well, that was before I realised you were really scared.’

‘I’m not really scared,’ Napoleon protested instantly. ‘I just value my life quite highly.’

Illya smiled at him indulgently. ‘As do I,’ he said, then he pointed suddenly and set the car to rocking in a way that made Napoleon’s stomach lurch. ‘Look! Goats!’

And Napoleon gripped hard at the edges of the car and smiled a death’s head smile.

‘Very nice, but would you mind not rocking the boat? Please? Goats don’t rank highly on my list of  _ reasons to die. _ ’

So Illya sat quietly and decorously for the rest of the trip, which took them up over a wide, rocky expanse of grass and bracken and gorse. As they crossed over the tram lines and a car full of people Illya made as if to lean over the edge, and Napoleon said, ‘If you rock the boat I swear to god you’ll be sleeping in the street.’

But eventually the car was slipping and clanking into its place at the top station, and Napoleon climbed out onto solid ground, hiding his sigh of relief.

‘You know, I don’t mind men with guns,’ he commented. ‘At least you know where you are with them.’

Illya grinned, and Napoleon threw an arm over his shoulders. ‘I suppose you want to do some exploring before we eat, huh,  _ tovarisch _ ?’

Illya looked about himself. ‘Well, the dolmen is way back there,’ he said, jerking his head behind him, ‘but I think some of the fossils are close by.’

‘Then fossils it is,’ Napoleon said. He would have rather wandered after the group of giggling twenty year old girls in mini skirts, but he supposed fossils would have to suffice. The sheer joy and excitement on Illya’s face was enough. ‘Hey, look,’ he said, pointing towards what looked like an old quarry. People had taken small stones and arranged them into patterns and words. Someone had written  _ love, _ and there was a CND symbol above it. He risked Illya’s wrath by increasing his pace to get over to the slope, and he gathered up stones himself and wrote SOLO on the hill. Illya stood over him with his hands on his hips.

‘Putting out a flag for Thrush?’ he asked cynically.

Napoleon snorted. ‘I don’t think it’s large enough to attract their attention.’

He gathered another load of stones and wrote ILLYA.

‘I don’t have enough for  _ Kuryakin,’ _ he excused himself, standing up and dusting off his knees.

‘Probably a good thing.’ Illya regarded the word for a moment with an indefinable smile, then reached out the point of his shoe and erased his name. ‘Illya is a bit more distinctive than Solo, don’t you think?’

‘In this neck of the woods, I’m sure.’

‘And together...’ Illya said.

‘Well, together,’ Napoleon agreed. ‘Together we’re good though, aren’t we, Illya?’

Illya grinned. ‘Yes, we are. Now, come with me and help me find these fossils. They’re not far, I think.’

  


((O))

  


Illya was beautiful. It struck Napoleon like an epiphany. It wasn’t like he hadn’t noticed it before. The girls in U.N.C.L.E. had gone on enough about Illya’s natural blond hair  _ to die for _ and his blue eyes, and they seemed to think he had extraordinary eyelashes, although Napoleon wasn’t sure he had let any girls close enough for them to know that. They talked about his trim figure and how compact he was, for which Napoleon read  _ short _ , although he had to admit that he liked the way Illya was just a little smaller than him, just a little more slender, although his hands were like a bear’s paws, minus the fur. Illya was hairier than one would expect, certainly hairier than any of the U.N.C.L.E. girls would ever be privileged to find out, but he was no cave man. They went on about his clothes too, about his slick black polo necks and simple suits, and Napoleon felt a little chagrin. After all, his own suits were beautiful, bespoke, and expensive.

But right now, Napoleon saw that Illya was especially beautiful, in an elemental way. He should have been naked. He was standing at the edge of a little rise of land; not on the edge of the cliff, because the land sloped away more gently than that for fifty yards;  _ then  _ it plunged in a limestone curtain down to more slopes and more rocks and cliffs below. He was standing there, and the sun was warm and lighting up every variation in his astonishingly variegated hair, and the wind was blowing so hard that it was going everywhere. His cheeks were pink and his eyes were wide open and just the same blue as the sea and sky, and his mouth was open showing teeth the same white as the crests of the waves. His lips and the wet inside of his mouth were such a basic red. Napoleon saw his forearms and the gold glint of the sun on those short hairs, and the lines of tendons and muscles, and Illya made him think of a horse, of a creature made purely for power and strength and beauty, and he wanted to take him and kiss him.

Soon he would take him to the beach. He needed to see Illya on the beach. That was something they hadn’t shared. He thought of Illya in a pair of trim black swimming trunks sitting on the sand, beaded with tiny silica jewels where he had been wet, glimmering on the sun. His skin would taste of salt.

God, he didn’t need to think like that. He really didn’t. Not about Illya. He blinked and tried to look at him objectively, as he had looked at him in the past. Just a man. Just a friend. He was standing there in his slacks and his polo shirt with the wind blasting through his hair, and he was saying something, but Napoleon couldn’t hear a word, because everything was stolen by the wind. And then Illya stopped talking and came back to him, grinning, gasping for breath because the wind took it all, and said, ‘Isn’t it incredible?’

‘Yeah,’ Napoleon agreed readily, because whatever Illya was talking about, it was incredible.

‘Look,’ Illya said, and he pointed to the slab of rock that Napoleon was leaning against, a table sized rectangle up on its side, and now Napoleon did look at it and saw that the entire slab was fossils. ‘Look at that, Napoleon!’ and his voice was on fire with interest. ‘Oh, brother, I wish I had a hammer… I know they’re not exactly the ammonite beds at Lyme Regis, but in their own way, they’re amazing.’

Napoleon looked. The fossils looked like ordinary sea shells, only turned to stone, and it was Illya’s excitement that really turned Napoleon on. He ran his fingers over the shells and made appreciative noises, but he was watching Illya’s face. Illya’s lips were parted, his tongue coming out every now and then to lick them wet in the drying wind, his eyes shining like a child on Christmas morning.

‘Illya, I never knew you liked fossils,’ Napoleon said. ‘I should have taken you to the Museum of Natural History...’

‘Oh, I’ve been to all the museums in New York,’ Illya shrugged that off, not even looking, not tearing his eyes away from the slab of fossils, and another parallel slab behind it. ‘I visited the London museums so many times when I was at Cambridge. The Natural History Museum, the V and A... You know me, Napoleon. I’m interested in everything.’

He said that so glibly, and Napoleon knew it was true. Fossils. American jazz. J. S. Bach. Quantum mechanics. Languages. John Masefield. Bees. Astronomy. Illya would get his teeth into anything, so it was no surprise that geology gave him such a buzz.

Illya started scrabbling through the shards and shards of broken rock on the ground, then turned his attention to the low and fractured cliff behind him, and he started prising at something, then lifted his hand, triumphant, a dusty chunk of rock in his palm.

‘There. Look. I didn’t need a hammer. The rock’s so friable.’

‘You’re cut,’ Napoleon said, taking Illya’s hand, not looking at the fossil at all, but just at the half inch slit in his finger that was welling bright, bright blood.

‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ Illya said, but Napoleon took out his handkerchief and wrapped it tenderly around Illya’s finger.

‘You never can be too careful when you’re abroad,’ he said.

‘I’m not abroad. I’m in Britain,’ Illya shrugged. Then his eyes softened from their excited glitter, and he said, ‘Thank you, Napoleon.’

‘Have you seen enough fossils?’ Napoleon asked.

Illya looked at the rock in his hand and said, ‘Give me a few more minutes.’

So Napoleon did, and he sat on a rock and idly looked at the pink thrift and yellow birdsfoot trefoil and little starry flowers of white in the grass. He watched a snail crawling and a black beetle so shiny it looked like polished ebony. And Illya ranged up and down the low, crumbling rock shelf, pocketing fossils, and then said briskly, ‘All right, Napoleon. You owe me lunch, don’t you?’ as if it had been Napoleon holding him up all along.

So they walked back along the undulating ground of tussocks of grass and tumbled rocks back to the peopled summit, where the restaurant was.

  


((O))

  


Illya wrapped each stone in a scrap of tissue from the restaurant toilets and placed them like sleeping children at the bottom of his rucksack. He sat at the table across from Napoleon and drank tea and ate an acceptable lunch, and then he hoisted his bag onto his back again and forced Napoleon, grumbling and groaning about his full stomach, to walk around some of the windy and exposed heights of this great rock.

He saw a small class of children, boys and girls, kneeling on a weather eroded limestone pavement while a schoolmaster with a bristling moustache spoke loudly about the insects that lived there. Illya itched to correct the simplified facts he was reeling off to them, but he thought that none of the children were really listening.

He remembered seeing a little boy in Cambridge pulling the wings off ants. He had been walking with Philip, and they came across this boy sitting on the path, intent upon something. He was wearing grey flannel shorts and his knees were bony and dirty, his hands just as dirty, and he was bending his head down, his eyes scrunched to slits, and when Illya and Philip had realised what he was doing Philip had turned away, actually looking queasy. Illya had seen a man bayoneted in the stomach in the streets of Kyiv when he was about the boy’s age, and he had seen a man swinging from a noose, his face purple and bloated like an overripe plum. Not many things made him queasy but rough seas, intense pain, and travelling facing the wrong direction on trains. So Illya had taken out his handkerchief and crouched down and lightly dusted the spot of path in front of the boy, then sat down, crossing his legs, unconsciously mirroring the boy’s posture.

‘What are you doing?’ he had asked, with no censure in his voice, just a light curiosity.

And the boy looked up, looking guilty. There were a lot of crawling ants on the path and a lot of broken wings, too.

‘Just nothing,’ the boy replied with an awkward shrug. ‘Just flies.’

‘They’re flying ants,’ Illya said, poking at one with a broken off twig. ‘ _ Lasius niger. _ Just common black ants. Did you know that at certain times of year ants develop wings so they can move away from their colonies?’

Just as he had, he thought. Away from the box apartment in Kyiv to university, then the Sorbonne, then here.

‘Look,’ Illya said, and he produced a magnifying glass from his pocket and held it over one of the ants. ‘See their legs? See their little mandibles and antennae? See that one, there?’ And he angled the glass over one poor roughly handled ant with no wings and a missing leg. ‘You’ve hurt that one. The kindest thing would be to kill it.’

And he didn’t feel a moment of compunction when he put his thumb on top of the ant and ground it into the dirt. Sometimes lives needed to be taken out of the world, sometimes because of compassion for the dying, and sometimes compassion for the living left behind.

‘But it’s dead now!’ the boy protested, and Illya said with just as little compunction, ‘You killed it when you tore off its wings. You’ve killed them all. Every single one of these ants when you tore off its wings.’

And the little boy hit out at him and scrambled to his feet and pounded away across the grass, and Illya was left sitting with the magnifying glass and the desperate, crawling ants, and he focussed the sun onto one of the dying masses with the glass and watched it burn with a little, twisted smile. Then he stood up and ground the rest of the ants into the dust with his foot, and went back to Philip.

‘Sometimes I can’t work you out, Ink,’ Philip said. There was a look of great sorrow on his face.

‘I don’t know how you mean,’ Illya said.

‘I thought at first you would be amazing with kids,’ Philip said. ‘I thought you had a touch.’

Illya grinned a brilliant, flashing grin, because then he had been young, in his twenties, lean and hard and too full of life to care about other people’s children.

‘And then I sent a snotty brat running for his mother?’

‘And you killed all those ants...’

‘They were dying,’ Illya said prosaically. ‘I made it easier. It’s best to commit cruelty quickly. It hurts less.’

There was something odd on Philip’s face. ‘I want kids,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’

Illya looked him up and down and said, ‘We have a problem of anatomy.’

‘I want kids anyway,’ Philip said, and Illya should have understood there and then, but he didn’t.

Philip linked an arm in his, then, and they carried on walking, and Philip asked Illya why he was carrying a magnifying glass, and Illya had no reason why. He didn’t tell Philip that when the Germans were killing people and rounding up the Jews he had pulled the wings off flies and killed ants by focussing the sun through broken glass, and had felt a small amount of power that had pushed away the feelings of helplessness and terror for a short space of time.

‘I love you,’ Philip had said, almost desperately, and in a quiet place in the park, shrouded by bushes, Philip took Illya’s face in his hands and kissed him so hard, and ran his hands through Illya’s hair, and for two pins Illya would have jerked off with him in the bushes, but he was so scared of arrest that he couldn’t even get hard. He combed his hair before they went back into the open, and made Philip comb his too, and resolved to fuck him properly later, when the sun had gone down and they were safe between four walls.

‘Illya. Illya.’

Illya blinked and looked towards Napoleon. ‘Hmm?’

Napoleon tugged at his elbow. ‘You stand there any longer staring at those kids, you’ll get into trouble. I never picked you for the paternal type.’

And Illya looked at Napoleon and back at the children, and shook himself.

‘Snotty little brats,’ he said, and he turned away and started to wander over the expanse of stone, keeping his head down so as to not turn his ankle in one of the deep, weather worn holes.

He missed fucking Philip. He missed a lot about Philip, not least the warm and constant companionship of someone who he thought loved him, whom he loved back. But he missed the fucking, too. Philip had been so good at that, and there were things that one’s hand and a jar of cold cream just couldn’t replicate. It had been such a long time. There had been a few men, but nothing serious. Just fumbles and fucking in the way of men, rough and quick with no emotion. No one had put their mouth on him. That was so much more intimate. It had just been hands and holes and no kissing. He would have liked to kiss someone. That was such a deep, tender thing; to kiss another man; to taste his mouth.

He looked at Napoleon’s mouth, and shivered. Napoleon was a master at kissing. He had never kissed him, of course, but he had seen him kiss, had seen the effect he had on innocents and Thrush women alike. He could turn knees to jelly.

‘ _ Oh _ ,’ he said, looking at Napoleon’s lips.

God, had he made that sound aloud? Napoleon was staring at him. And then Illya stumbled, twisting his ankle in a hole just as he had been so anxious not to, and his bottom thumped onto the ground, and he said, ‘ _ Damn! _ ’

Napoleon was instantly kneeling beside him.

‘Illya? Are you okay? Your ankle?’

Illya withdrew his foot gingerly from the hole. His walking boots had helped, but the joint was throbbing.

‘Just a twist,’ he said. ‘Not a sprain, I think. Definitely not a break.’

‘Let me take a look.’

So Illya sat still as Napoleon, with great tenderness, unlaced the boot and eased it off. He drew down Illya’s thick sock, and exposed his foot to the air, white and a little damp from the heat. Napoleon jokingly wrinkled his nose, and Illya grinned.

‘That hurt?’ Napoleon asked, prodding his fingers into the joint, and Illya winced.

‘A bit,’ he said, but the ankle wasn’t really puffing up. It was just a twist.

‘Can you walk?’

‘I will be able to, in a bit.’

His foot was in Napoleon’s lap, and Napoleon’s hands were around it despite his joke about the smell. Napoleon didn’t seem inclined to let go and Illya didn’t feel inclined to move. Napoleon’s fingers began to gently stroke and knead at the joint, and Illya sighed in contentment and leant back onto the flat rock so he was lying, staring straight up into the sky. Lying flat like this he was relatively sheltered, and the sun was hot. The sky was deep with blue, and cotton thin shreds of cloud broke the perfection in a few places. His eyes drifted after their slow movement and then he brought them back to the zenith again. The chatter of the school children and the stentorian voice of the master moved away, and Napoleon asked, ‘Going to sleep?’

‘No,’ Illya said. ‘Just watching the clouds. It’s not often we stop long enough to watch the clouds.’

He had taken walks with Philip on that last seaside holiday. They had strolled out of the town and walked along the cliffs, and they had stopped on a rise above the sea and lolled on the grass. The waves had rolled in and seagulls had cried and Illya had lain with his head on Philip’s lap while Philip’s fingers carded through his hair. He hadn’t thought of his thesis. He hadn’t thought about what he would do next. He hadn’t thought about anything. He had just lain there and listened to the cyclical shush of the waves on the shingle shore and felt Philip’s fingers against his scalp, feeling little shivers running up his spine that were totally detached from the hot day.

‘You think we’re alone?’ Philip had asked, and Illya had grunted and said, ‘Aren’t we all alone when we strip away the veneer of civilisation?’

And Philip had batted at his head lightly and slipped out from under him and then come to kneel at his waist, flicking open the button on his slacks and pushing down the zip and bringing Illya’s soft cock out into the open air.

God, that had been a sweet half hour, lying there melting in the sun, eyes half closed, the heat turning his bones to honey, and all the while Philip’s soft, long fingers touching him, making a different kind of bone, stroking him to hardness and then kissing his tip so lightly. He had traced his tongue over the soft little cowl, then pushed it back and swallowed Illya’s flaring head and hard shaft into his mouth, taking it so deep into his hot, wet throat, and Illya had clenched his hands so hard into that grass that he dug earth into his fingernails and then grasped at Philip’s head and thrust up into his mouth, and then came with a cry that blended with the waves crashing below. He had felt as if he were part of the earth, part of everything, part of Philip, never alone. Whenever he made love with Philip he lost all sense of his separation from the rest of mankind. And now he was so alone. He hadn’t experienced that profound feeling of connection for so long, and he ached for it.

Napoleon’s hands compressed warmly on his ankle, and he asked, ‘How’s it feeling?’

Illya blinked and stirred and rotated his foot gingerly.

‘Not too bad,’ he said.

‘And, er, that?’ Napoleon asked, nodding his head towards Illya’s groin. Illya lifted his head and looked down, and flushed. He had been so deep in memory. He hadn’t realised that he had started to fill out there.

He snatched his foot out of Napoleon’s hands and started to pull his sock and boot back on. The drenching embarrassment put paid to the burgeoning erection.

‘Maybe I did start to fall asleep,’ he murmured. Maybe all of this was a dream. He felt annoyed at himself. He didn’t usually let his guard down so far, even in front of Napoleon. ‘We should get out of here, shouldn’t we, Napoleon? You don’t want to spend all day up here.’

Napoleon shrugged. ‘Well, the view’s pretty good from where I am,’ he said, but he wasn’t looking at the view. He was looking straight at Illya. Illya blinked and looked down confusedly, and shrugged his rucksack back onto his back. He didn’t know quite what to do.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon said, but Illya was standing up, testing his weight on his injured foot. It was all right. It was a little sore, but it was perfectly good to walk on.

‘We can go back down past that burial chamber, I think,’ he said.

‘You don’t want to take the tram, rest your ankle?’ Napoleon asked.

And Illya grinned. ‘Where’s the fun in that?’

Napoleon made a noise that was half growl, half sigh. It was a noise Illya loved, although he would never tell Napoleon that. He loved the sound of Napoleon stirring himself to do something that he sensed he might regret, but would probably enjoy. And by the time they had hiked around the contours of the Orme and were making their way down towards where Illya’s map showed the burial chamber, his ankle felt all right and Napoleon was quite happy and Illya thought he had forgotten about that odd, embarrassing moment when he had been rubbing Illya’s foot and Illya had become aroused.

‘Look,’ Illya said when they had tramped across the field to the ancient slabs of the stone tomb.

‘That’s it?’ Napoleon asked, putting his hands on his hips and staring. There were houses very near by, and the chamber was close by a stone wall, and looked like nothing more than a handful of broken slabs of rock.

‘Napoleon, have you any idea how old this thing is?’ Illya asked.

‘Well, Buckingham Palace is pretty old too, but it’s in better shape,’ Napoleon said, and Illya resisted the urge to bat at his arm.

‘Come on,’ he said with a sigh, and they walked on past the burial chamber and over a stile and into a narrow street, and together they found their way back down into the town. They were both hot and sweating by the time they reached sea level, and Napoleon bought two ice creams and handed one to Illya, and Illya practically inhaled the sweet, chill treat.

  


((O))

  


They wandered through the streets for a little longer, and both saw a bookshop at the same time and gravitated towards it, and Illya came out with a novel while Napoleon opted for a glossy magazine, because he had brought enough serious reading with him and hadn’t touched any of it after they had gotten off the plane. Then there was dinner, and then there was the retreat to the hotel room, and Napoleon noticed that Illya was limping a little on the ankle which he swore was fine, so he ran the bath and opened the door and gestured into the steamy space.

‘In. Now,’ he said.

Illya lifted his eyes from his book and blinked over the top of his tinted reading glasses.

‘Huh? I thought you were running that for you?’

‘I’m running it for that foot of yours. I don’t want to spend tomorrow in our room.’

Illya glanced at his foot and then back at Napoleon, and said, ‘It’s not that bad. Besides, it wouldn’t stop  _ you _ going out.’

‘I don’t want to spend the day without you, either. Now, come on, before the water gets cold.’

So Illya sighed and put his book down and laid his glasses on top of it, and unselfconsciously stripped off polo shirt and slacks and wandered into the steamy bathroom just in his underpants. And Napoleon watched that backside covered in the semi-translucent white cotton fabric as he walked, and smiled. God, Illya had a good ass. He remembered that time on the Riviera when they had both been bent over searching for booby traps in their beds, and his ass had brushed Illya’s, and he had felt a spark of electricity right through his core. Yes, Illya had a fine ass. Yes, he did like blonds…

‘Napoleon, would you like to stop ogling me and tell me where you put the towels?’ Illya asked in a tone of infinite patience.

‘Oh, er – ’

He didn’t blush. He was good at not blushing. But he hadn’t even realised that Illya had turned around and that his other brain, that little brain he carried around in his penis, had been staring at the contours in the front of Illya’s underpants.

‘The towels… Er – ’ He turned around and grabbed a big bath towel from a pile on the end of the bed and threw it at Illya. Illya caught it with a glower, and stalked away into the bathroom again.

_ Dammit _ . What the hell was happening to him? He had always flirted with Illya. He had always appreciated Illya’s physical form, and, god, he loved Illya’s mind, Illya’s sense of humour, Illya’s weirdness, Illya’s Russian exoticism. He even found something to smile about in the way that Illya sulked and grouched and growled at the world. But he had never found himself reacting quite like this. It was as if he were rooming with a different Illya all of a sudden, or as if scales had fallen from his eyes, as if Illya had emerged from a camouflaging shell.

He sighed and wandered across to the window and looked out over the bay. The sun was still high enough to cast light over the ripples and the waves. The sea was blue to the horizon, cradled by those two Ormes as if it were being held in loving arms. It really was beautiful here, and he wondered why this beauty seemed to be conjuring a little melancholy in Illya. Illya did tend towards brooding, but this was different. This wasn’t just his usual cantankerousness. He seemed vulnerable in an unusual way. Perhaps it was that that had suddenly lit this reaction in Napoleon. Illya was so rarely vulnerable.

He went back to the en suite door and tapped on the wood.

‘Illya,’ he said. ‘Can I come in?’

There was a sploshing noise, and then Illya’s voice came from within. ‘If you must, Napoleon.’

‘Well, with that gracious invitation,’ Napoleon said, pushing the door open. Illya hadn’t used bubble bath, of course. Things like that weren’t in his nature. He was just sitting stretched out in the bathtub with the water lapping around his chest and all of his body darkened and distorted by the water. But still, it was all quite, quite visible. He looked beautiful.

‘Just do your business, Napoleon. I won’t watch,’ Illya said.

‘Oh.’ Napoleon realised his misapprehension. ‘No, I didn’t need the toilet. I just wanted to – well, to talk.’

Illya rolled his head on the enamel bath top to look at Napoleon as he sat down. ‘It couldn’t wait? Are you so excited to make plans for tomorrow?’

Napoleon wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. He had wanted to say the same up on the Orme, but he hadn’t known then what to say either.

‘Illya, you don’t seem very happy,’ he said eventually.

Illya growled. ‘Well, Napoleon, I was trying to have a relaxing bath and now I seem to be having a strange and rather tension filled conversation with you.’

So Napoleon smiled, trying to lift the tension. ‘I didn’t mean to be strange with you, Illya. I just wanted to talk and I didn’t want to wait.’

Illya straightened up a little, and Napoleon tried not to look as the currents of the water stirred over the length of him, moving his golden brown body hair like seaweed.

‘All right, Napoleon,’ he said, ‘but you do have me at a disadvantage.’

‘Would you rather I were naked too?’

‘No,’ Illya said very firmly. ‘That would be stranger still. Now, what is it you wanted to talk about?’

Napoleon looked down at his hands, and then said, ‘I was just worried about you, Illya. You seem very distracted. Just – off, as if there’s something in your mind that’s bothering you. You seem to like this place, but then I get the distinct impression you’re not happy here.’

Illya let out a very long sigh, closing his eyes and resting his head back on the roll top.

‘You’re not privileged to know all of my life history, Napoleon,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to know all of my life history. This place is bringing back some memories, that’s all. Some of them are very happy, and some of them are – not.’

Napoleon leaned forward now, watching Illya intently.

‘I didn’t think you’d ever been here before?’

‘Here? No, I haven’t. I’ve been to places like here. A few places. One place in particular.’

‘In Britain?’ Napoleon risked asking. ‘When you were at Cambridge?’

Illya’s eyes opened so suddenly that Napoleon jerked backwards. How could a single pair of blue eyes look so intense?

‘It doesn’t matter, Napoleon,’ he said. ‘The past is the past. There’s nothing to be done.’

‘Are you sure about that?’ Napoleon asked quietly.

Illya laughed. ‘I do not think anyone has yet invented a time machine. Yes, Napoleon, I am sure. May I continue my bath now?’

‘Is it helping that ankle any?’ Napoleon asked.

Illya raised the leg up into the air. Beads of water caught on his leg hairs and rolled down towards his knee. He rotated the foot, and shrugged.

‘It feels all right,’ he said. ‘It will be all right tomorrow. A night’s rest will do it good.’

‘Ah, well, that’s good,’ Napoleon said. ‘I thought we’d have a quiet day tomorrow anyway. If the weather holds, there’s a beach I’ve heard of not far away...’

Illya regarded him. ‘You want to spend the day sunbathing?’

‘Not  _ all  _ day,’ Napoleon said quickly, recognising that wasn’t a battle he was going to win. ‘There’s a castle too, and – well, other old things, I’m sure.’

‘I suppose you’ll be on the lookout for bathing beauties,’ Illya said rather darkly.

Napoleon felt rather hurt. ‘You know, Illya, women aren’t the  _ only  _ thing I can think of,’ he protested.

Illya pulled the plug out with his toes and let the water start to drain, and Napoleon quickly jumped up and held out his towel. The Russian unfolded himself from the bath and started to rub the water from his body, and Napoleon tried not to look.

‘They are  _ almost _ the only thing,’ Illya shrugged, wrapping the towel around his waist.

‘Well,  _ almost _ ,’ Napoleon conceded, and Illya flicked his eyes up at him, his eyelashes darkened by water, his hair dripping water, and Napoleon’s lips parted. It felt very hot in here and the space was very small, and Illya was very close to him. Very close…

He was so beautiful. He was looking straight into Illya’s eyes, straight into the dilated pools of his pupils that were surrounded by that thin rim of brilliant blue. His eyelashes were so dark and wet. He looked so beautiful, so perfect. Illya’s breath was coming in little warm puffs, he was so close that Napoleon could feel that breath.

‘They’re  _ not  _ the only thing,’ Napoleon said.

Illya seemed to catch something, some idea of the thoughts in Napoleon’s mind, and his lips parted as if to ask a question –

And then they were kissing. He couldn’t say how it happened, but suddenly Napoleon’s hand was behind Illya’s head and his lips were on Illya’s lips, and Illya made such a small, animal sound of need that Napoleon’s stomach flipped over. It was almost a sob, and Illya’s lips parted to let Napoleon’s tongue into his mouth, and he tasted so good.

And then Illya wasn’t there any more, he wasn’t in the room, and Napoleon was standing there with his mouth open and his hand still in the air, and it was as if Illya had just vaporised.

It took him a while to move, and when he did he went into the other room, and Illya wasn’t there either. He wasn’t sure how anyone could dress so quickly, especially when wet, but apparently Illya had managed it.

‘Well, at least he didn’t hit me,’ he murmured.

  


((O))

  


The tide was high, and the waves crashed in one after another, foaming on the shingle that covered the upper reaches of the beach. Illya sat with his knees up and huddled to his chest with his arms around them. He wasn’t wearing underwear. He wasn’t even wearing shoes. He felt such an enormous fool. He hadn’t picked up his wallet, hadn’t even picked up his key.

And how was he going to go back now? How could he carry on sleeping in that room with Napoleon? What an utter fool he had made of himself.

He ground his hands over his face and then clasped them around his knees again, and watched the waves. The sun was low in the sky behind him and all the buildings were casting long shadows that stretched towards the shoreline, but the waves were still in sunlight, the white foam glinting with gold, the blue-grey depthless water glinting with gold. He picked up a stone and flung it at the water, and watched it sink without hope of retrieval into the depths.

_Oh, Philip…_

He remembered that last night so vividly. He remembered walking with him on the shingled beach, their feet grinding stone against stone. It was all little flinty stones there, brown and yellow and grey, not like the shingle here. But the waves had rolled in just the same, over and over, and there had been holiday makers silhouetted on the cob where Jane Austen’s characters had walked. There were couples with their arms round one another in a way that he and Philip could never dare do in public. And Philip had been quiet for a long time, and it had felt like a storm building, and then he had said, ‘Eel, I’m getting married.’

And everything had stopped. The waves had stopped, the wind had stopped, the sounds of chatter and laughter had stopped. There was nothing at all, nothing underfoot, and he was falling, falling forever, his stomach pitching over and his mouth falling open, and for a moment he couldn’t even remember the English that he had spent these last years so faithfully learning.

And finally he had grasped enough English words, and he stammered, ‘M-married?’

And Philip turned and took his hands and said, ‘Oh, Illya, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Look, sit down. You’re white as a sheet.’

And Illya almost sat, because he didn’t know what else to do; but then a vibrant anger flooded him and he asked, ‘ _ Married _ ? How can you be getting married? We’re already – We are – How are you – How can you be – ?’

He hardly knew how to speak. He was so good at picking up languages. He had learnt French within a year. But now the English was dropping away.

‘Illya,’ Philip said, and Illya snatched his hands away from Philip’s grasp as if his fingers had become red hot. ‘Illya, it’s what mother and father expect. I complete my doctorate, I get married, I have children, I continue the line. Father’s family came over with the invasion, you know. I don’t know what it would do to him to find out his son’s – well – bent as a nine bob note.’

Illya felt as if he had been struck physically around the head. It was so hard to grasp for English words. ‘A nine bob – ’ he faltered, trying to work it out. ‘There are no nine shilling notes...’

Philip smiled mournfully and said, ‘No. That’s exactly the point of the simile, old chap. Bent. Queer. Not right. Like you and me.’

‘But – we’re right,’ he stammered. ‘We are – we are so right...’

Philip reached out a hand again as if to touch him on the back, and Illya stepped away. He was drifting out at sea, over an endless depth of black water. Philip, getting married. Filya, his love, to whom  _ he  _ were as good as married. Philip, to whom he had made love just three hours ago, tangled in the blankets in the hotel bed. He had never imagined anything changing between them. Philip had just handed in his final thesis. Illya was in the process of finishing. And they would find jobs somewhere and live in a house somewhere, and just go on as they were, together. It didn’t matter what they did if they were together.

‘Don’t – ’ Illya began. ‘ _ Ulyublenyy _ . Don’t you love me? I thought we loved – ’

Philip tried to take his hands again, but Illya wouldn’t let him.

‘I have never loved anyone like I love you,’ Philip said, holding out his hands, beseeching, imploring.

‘Then how – Why – ?’ It seemed so simple. They loved. They were in love. So they stayed together, forever. It was as if Philip had torn off a mask. Who was this man standing in front of him on the shingle beach in the evening glow?

‘Eel, my love, I  _ must _ marry Marian,’ Philip insisted. ‘I don’t love her. Of course I don’t. But mother and father need me to – they  _ expect _ me to.’

‘Marian? She’s called Marian?’

He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to have a name given to this person, to this anonymous woman who would make Philip leave him behind.

‘Illya, she’s the daughter of daddy’s oldest friend,’ Philip implored. ‘My entire inheritance depends on – ’

And that vacant cold inside him became an utter Arctic chill. ‘Your  _ inheritance _ ?’

He didn’t know what to say. Even if he had only had Ukrainian in his grasp he still wouldn’t have known what to say. He was reeling. He was falling apart. He had been together with Philip for five years. He had never foreseen a time without him. He  _ loved  _ him, and now that love hurt like the pain in his gut when he hadn’t eaten for days.

‘Go away,’ he said. He hardly knew how to speak. He couldn’t even swear. ‘Just – go away. Leave me alone.’

And Philip tried to reach him again. ‘Eel, we don’t have to give this up entirely. I would live with Marian, of course, but we could still – ’

Illya stepped backwards, and the crunch of the shingle underfoot sounded like an explosion. He couldn’t find the words. He let loose a blast of Ukrainian and Philip stared at him, his face white in the failing light. And Illya turned away and walked and walked and walked.

The shingle was crunching. The waves were slapping onto the shore just feet away. Illya had his hands over his face and his palms were hot and wet with tears, but he was no longer alone. A dark shape settled on the stones beside him, and Napoleon’s voice said, ‘Illya, I think we need to talk.’

Illya dropped his hands, looked at his bare feet through blurred eyes. He looked at his toes that were chalky from stone dust. He raised his head a little and looked at the foaming rills of water that fizzed between the stones.

‘ _Illya_ ,’ Napoleon insisted, putting a hand on his arm. Napoleon’s face was white in the evening light just as Philip’s had been. He looked so concerned. Illya scrubbed his fists into his eyes and considered how easy it would be to walk away now like he had back then. But Napoleon would follow him. He knew that. Napoleon would always follow him.

‘Illya, my friend, what is it?’ Napoleon asked. His voice was lower than the waves but somehow every syllable was clear. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry I kissed you. If you want me to just go – ’

And that was worse than anything. That made a great hole open up inside Illya’s chest, and he said precipitately, ‘ _No_ . No, don’t go. Don’t go anywhere.’

Napoleon was quiet then, and after a moment his hand rested onto Illya’s arm, and he said, ‘I’m here, Illya.’

And the quietness grew and spread around them. Illya sat still with Napoleon’s hand on his arm, and the waves kept sweeping in to shore, and sometimes a seagull called in the darkening sky. Napoleon just sat, silent, and Illya watched the waves and let the light evening breeze dry his face, and then suddenly he was shivering and Napoleon put an arm around his shoulders and said, ‘Yeah, the temperature’s dropped a bit. That’s what comes of running out without shoes and socks,  _tovarisch_ .’

Illya glanced down at his feet again, and said, ‘Ah, yes...’

‘Illya,’ Napoleon said very seriously then. ‘I’m not sorry I kissed you. I mean, I’m only sorry if it upset you. If it didn’t upset you – ’

Illya didn’t know what to say. So much time had passed since he first landed at an English airport, his eyes adjusting to the constant Roman typeface on all the signs and documents and publications, all those strange letters that didn’t stand for what they should stand for, all those new words and concepts. He knew English so well now, but he didn’t know what words to use.

‘You taste good,’ he said after a long time, and Napoleon laughed, and his laugh seemed small and surprising in the quiet open air.

‘Trust you to judge me on consumability,’ he said.

‘Is that a word?’ Illya asked, and Napoleon shrugged.

‘It is now. So, if I don’t have halitosis or a fuzzy tongue, why did you run out of the hotel without shoes on?’

‘Without underwear either,’ Illya said rather mournfully, and Napoleon said, ‘Well, I wondered how you got dressed so quickly. Illya, why did you run out of the hotel?’

Illya sighed and got to his feet and looked down at the smooth eggs of grey rocks that he stood upon. The sea was very near now, the tide very high. He took a few steps forward and the foaming water surged over his feet, tickling his skin. He could walk into that water, just walk and walk, and then swim away. Napoleon wouldn’t follow him there. But – But he didn’t want Napoleon to be left behind. Oh, he  _had_ tasted good. He had felt so good. It had been so perfect to feel that wonderful connection with someone, a connection that went beyond platonic friendship and into the realms of love and lust.

His friendship with Napoleon felt too good to risk. But then, it had already gone past the point of no return. Neither of them would forget that kiss in the bathroom, when Illya was wearing nothing but a towel and Napoleon’s fingers had been running through his wet hair, and he had tasted so, so good. His feet were cold, but having Napoleon next to him was such a warm thing, such a safe thing. He had so missed that feeling of being utterly safe with someone.

A larger wave shocked him, splashing him up to the knees, and Napoleon suddenly laughed, towing him back from the reach of the water. Napoleon had such a wonderful laugh. But he missed Philip so hard that he ached. For all of the betrayal, for all of the pain, he missed him.

‘I have some – bad memories,’ he said into the evening light, looking at the dark line where sky met sea, not at his friend.

‘Of kissing?’ Napoleon asked, bewildered, as if a bad kiss was nothing he could comprehend.

‘Of – a person,’ Illya said, and he turned away from the sea and made his way back towards the concrete steps that led up to the promenade. It would have been good if they could have walked onto the pier, but the pier was closed now. The promenade was almost empty. The ground was rough under his bare feet, but there was still heat in the surface. There were little palm trees planted between the prom and the road, their leaves moving darkly in the evening breeze, and a blaze of yellow and orange flowers in the beds beneath, striving to push their brightness into the coming night.

Napoleon walked very quietly beside him.

‘Illya, you don’t have to tell me, but if it would help, I want to listen,’ he said.

Illya felt as if there were something in his throat, something choking him. He wasn’t sure how he could even utter Philip’s name, let alone talk about all that had happened. It would be like tearing the scab from a bullet wound and pushing his finger deep into the hole beneath.

‘Let’s go back to the hotel before my feet freeze,’ he said.

His feet weren’t that cold now he was walking, but it was an excuse, a diversion of sorts. And he wanted things from Napoleon that he couldn’t get out here in the open. At least, he thought he did. He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything. At least being in the privacy of their room would give him the opportunity to find out.

  


((O))

  


Illya seemed like a wild animal that he had brought back to the room, nervous as a cat, looking like a cat in his slick black trousers and polo neck. He had no underwear on under there. Napoleon tried not to dwell on that delicious fact, because Illya seemed far too wan and fragile for him to be thinking like that. He let his eyes rest on Illya’s bare, dusty, bony feet instead, because somehow there was nothing arousing in that. Illya’s feet just made him look so very vulnerable. He sat down on the edge of his bed and his feet were planted flat and still on the brown carpet, and he just looked broken.

He wanted to question him. God how he wanted to question him. He had broken diamond hard Thrush men with his questioning. But he didn’t want to break Illya. He wanted to heal him.

‘Illya, do you want to talk?’ he asked.

Illya looked up then. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, Napoleon, I want to do the opposite of talking.’

‘You – want – ’

Napoleon wasn’t sure what to do. Illya was never easy to read. The vast amount of his experience was with women, and men were so different, and Illya was utterly different to anyone he had ever known. But then Illya took matters into his own hands, jerking up onto those bare feet and coming across the room to Napoleon and pushing his hands into his hair, pulling his head close, kissing so hard and so furiously that it practically bruised Napoleon’s lips. Napoleon understood his need, didn’t draw back, kissed back as hard as Illya was kissing him. Illya was hot and soft and strong and beautiful, but there was such a hard edge of choked need in him, and Napoleon knew that most of that need wasn’t for him, but just for any receptive human body who would provide a harbour for his loneliness.

‘Illya,’ he said, gently pushing him away as Illya broke the kiss with gasping breaths. ‘Illya, are you sure you want to – ’

Illya’s eyes were shining and his cheeks were flushed and his lips were red and pouting from the force of the kiss.

‘Illya, I don’t want to take advantage of you,’ Napoleon continued, but Illya reached for him again, growling, ‘I’m not a girl, Napoleon. No one’s taking advantage.’

Napoleon caught his wrists, held them loosely with his fingers, stopping them before they could touch him again.

‘ _ Illya _ ,’ he said. ‘Listen to me. Half an hour ago you ran out of this room because I kissed you. I don’t want to – I don’t know – I don’t want to – ’

He dropped Illya’s wrists and shrugged expansively, unable to think of a word to say. Illya took a single step back, looking almost shell shocked, shaking his head. He looked so small and pale and Napoleon caught one of his hands again, and kissed the inside of his wrist where thin blue veins ran just under the skin. He had kissed so many women in just that spot, in just that way, but Illya’s wrist was so different; thicker, less delicate perhaps; far too strong. But it was beautiful. It was so beautiful. His hand had a strong capability that the hands of those women didn’t have.

‘Illya,’ he said softly, and instead of kissing him again he slipped his arms around Illya’s compact, slim body and rested his head against the side of Illya’s head, and just held him. His palms were on the hard, flat plates of Illya’s shoulder blades, his cheek was pressed against Illya’s ear, and he could feel the quick tattoo of his heart, the rise and fall of every breath, as Illya tried to steady himself into calm.

‘Come and walk with me,’ Napoleon said. ‘Put your shoes on.’ Then he laughed and said, ‘Put your underwear on too. Come walk with me, out in the air. Talk to me, yes? Let’s make this something more than a spur of the moment thing?’

  


((O))

  


They walked. The sun had fallen below the buildings but there was still a golden light in the air to the west, and the clouds in the east caught their light and glowed. Illya had his hands deep in his pockets and his eyes were on the pavement in front of him, and Napoleon walked easily beside him, not talking yet. Just walking, their footsteps treading in time together.

‘We’ll be all right, you know,’ Napoleon said after a long space of silence.

Illya grunted some kind of response. He didn’t know what to say. The waves seemed to make enough noise to fill the silence, like the quiet murmur of distant conversation. Every time he thought of opening his mouth another wave shushed onto the shore and he closed his mouth again and just carried on walking.

He could feel Napoleon’s lips still. He could feel them on his, the hard pressure of them, the blood-filled softness of them, the little catch of his teeth behind them. That had felt so good. It had made him hungry. Perhaps it was his hunger that scared him, because perhaps that would set him on an inevitable trail. Blazing love. Consumption. Loss. He couldn’t lose Napoleon. He loved him too much.

And he remembered… God… He had been walking down that narrow little staircase at Trinity, and Philip had been coming up, that first time they kissed.

He had lived close to Philip for almost a year, their rooms so near to one another that when he turned down his records he could hear Philip’s stentorian Wagner or quick-fingered Chopin coming through the walls. They had never argued about their differing tastes in music. Illya had delighted in introducing Philip to jazz, and Philip had so loved talking at length about the Wagner’s opulence or the exquisite nature of Bach. They had spent hours in one another’s rooms, just sitting, talking, running away down wild trails of conversation that erased the ticking of the clock and the light outside the window, so that suddenly one of them would look and see it was three a.m. and pitch black outside, and remember an early lecture he particularly wanted to attend, or a supervisor’s meeting that couldn’t be missed.

They had been so close. Like Illya was now with Napoleon, they had been so close. Platonic love, he thought. Friendship. A meeting of minds.

And then Illya had been coming down those stairs, carrying an armful of books, and he had heard someone’s tread. Then Philip had come around the turn at a trot, and was halfway up Illya’s flight when he noticed that Illya was there. Illya had pressed himself against the cool wall and Philip had turned sideways. Philip tried to slide himself past Illya, and Illya’s books made a wedge between them, and he almost dropped them. And Philip had laughed and Illya had laughed, and Philip’s eyes had met his, and Illya had not noticed until then what an amazing shade of grey-green they were. Philip had smiled, and – it had been just like in the bathroom, just as it had been with Napoleon. He hadn’t understood how it happened, but Philip’s lips had brushed against his and Illya’s lips had parted, and it had felt so beautiful and perfect.

Time had gone away. Everything had gone away, the staircase and the rickety banister and the scent of the damp stone building. The sharp corner of the pile of books against Illya’s ribs had disappeared. The slight chill in his feet had disappeared. He forgot that he was wearing his reading glasses still and that he had to get back to his room to finish off this piece of research and that there was air around him and gravity holding him to the dirty carpet and the wooden stairs. There was just Philip, his lips, the taste of him.

And then Philip wasn’t kissing him any more.

‘Oh, Christ, Illya,’ Philip had said, and Illya had blinked and groped for words and found none. ‘Christ, I’m sorry,’ Philip had said, and Illya said, ‘ _ Ni, ya – _ No, I – I mean – ’

And he stared at Philip and then gradually felt how the books were pressing into his chest again. The walls swooped back, the air swooped back, and he was breathing again, standing there on this chilly staircase with Philip so close to him, and everything that was platonic about their friendship had been transformed.

‘No,’ Illya said again. ‘Don’t be sorry.’

There was that weirdness, that oddness that Illya had felt before when he hadn’t been sure which way someone was inclined, as if they were two male dogs circling, wary, trying to work out their relation to one another. Philip must be queer. He must be. Philip felt love for men, and Illya – Well, he had never quite worked that out himself. He had felt those feelings for women but he had just as easily felt them for men, and he didn’t know what that made him. It made him queer, he supposed. It made him strange.

‘You mean – ’ Philip began, and Illya smiled, because this was so sudden but so perfect. It was like sliding the two halves of a broken saucer back together and finding they fit so perfectly that they left no seam. ‘Illya, I mean, are you – ’ Philip said, looking so earnest, looking so real. ‘Illya.’ And he lowered his voice as if someone might be listening, as if anyone who was there wouldn’t have already seen him kissing Illya on the stairs. ‘Illya, you’re queer too?’

Hearing that out loud was like a punch in the stomach, and Illya faltered. It was a scary thing. To have that said out loud was a fearful thing where Illya came from.

‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually, because he had kissed girls before and he had kissed boys as well, one or two. And then he laughed and said, ‘I could be for you.’

And, ‘God,’ Philip had said. He leant so heavily against the banister that the wood creaked ominously. He looked as if his bones no longer worked. But at that creak he straightened up again with a fleeting look of shock, and then a smile, and said again, ‘God. Illya. Come back to my room. Will you come back to my room? Will you do that?’

So Illya had. They had been so chaste. He had come into Philip’s room and Philip had offered him a drink as politely as if he had invited him for an evening of music and talking, but then they had sat together on Philip’s bed and Philip had carded his fingers through Illya’s hair and Illya had kissed his face and his fingers and his wrists again and again, and they had laughed and talked and felt the warmth of their bodies against each other. They hadn’t undressed or even spoken of sex. They had just kissed and touched and basked in the warmth of this amazing new thing.

They had spent so long getting to know one another in this new way. Illya remembered beautiful days that seemed full of sun and warmth despite the time of year. He remembered all of those long, quiet times in his room or Philip’s, those times of slowly exploring one another’s bodies. There was talking and then Illya would make a shy suggestion or Philip would ask something with more confidence, and they grew to know the feeling of flesh on flesh, of warm, naked arms around backs and chests. Illya learnt to count Philip’s ribs under the thin muscle and skin. He learnt how to make Philip go nerveless with pleasure, how to flick his tongue over his stiffening nipple or draw it up the salt of his neck until it rasped on stubble. He learnt how when he sucked Philip’s ear lobe into his mouth it made his lover gasp aloud, and how he got an even deeper response from taking each finger in turn and suckling at them like a newborn calf.

They talked about past experiences, Philip’s initiations into a childish kind of male love at public school, and then his flowering of confidence at university, right here in Cambridge. And Illya had little to say to that. He felt almost ashamed at the paucity of his experience, his few times with girls, and his experience with men that had gone no further than kissing. But Philip had been so gentle, so slow. He had had patience with all of Illya’s reticence and soothed his fears, until at last they arrived at a time when they lay together naked on Philip’s bed, all of Illya’s skin against all of Philip’s, finally feeling the amazing touch of rough hair on rough hair, Illya’s legs wrapped around Philip’s. Finally Illya felt the exquisite joy of his hot, hardening cock against Philip’s, and from that point he couldn’t hold himself any more, and he plunged into this dizzying new world without looking back for a moment.

And the waves curled onto the shore and pushed stone against stone and then sucked back into the dark, cold depths, and Napoleon slipped his fingers into Illya’s in the almost-dark of the empty prom, and said, ‘Was it all right, Illya, that I kissed you?’ and Illya said, ‘Yes, Napoleon. Yes, it was.’

‘Will you talk?’ Napoleon asked, and Illya replied, ‘I don’t think I can. But I am thinking. I have thought.’

It was beautiful that Napoleon accepted that. The silence hung on them again. Further in to the town there were the sounds of people in the streets, men in groups of two or three leaving the pubs as the evening drew in. There was laughter and occasionally a raised voice above the general murmur. All the time the waves scoured at those sounds, effaced them, so that every moment seemed like a brief peak of life that fell away into the void.

‘What shall we do tomorrow, then?’ Napoleon asked eventually.

Illya shrugged. ‘I thought you wanted to go to the beach? Whatever we do, I think we should hire a car. A good car. Something with horses under the bonnet. There are roads here that make it worth it.’

  


((O))

  


Napoleon nudged Illya into a pub just as they were ringing last orders, and he bought a bottle of scotch from the bar. The barmaid slipped the bottle into a brown paper bag and handed it over with a smile, and it was only as Napoleon turned away that he realised that the girl had been pretty and he hadn’t even thought of flirting. He could only think of Illya, it seemed. Somehow something had been flicked in him in that long day of bright sunshine, and Illya had cast everything else into the shade.

‘There, now we look like a pair of drunkards,’ he murmured to his friend as they went back out into the street, tucking the bag under his arm with a grin.

‘What is this in aid of, Napoleon?’ Illya asked rather cynically.

Napoleon shrugged because he wasn’t sure what answer would please Illya best.

‘Why should it be in aid of anything?’ he asked eventually.

Back in their room Napoleon looked Illya up and down, trying to read him somehow, trying to work out what was happening in his mind. He never could. He looked at his legs and remembered how he had been splashed by that wave, hours ago, it seemed.

‘You should get out of those trousers,’ he said. ‘They’re still wet.’

‘I suppose they are,’ Illya said laconically. He started to strip off the trousers while Napoleon wandered into the en suite and came back with a couple of glasses. He opened the bottle and sniffed the whiskey inside critically, then poured a small measure into each glass.

‘There you go,’ he said, as Illya sat down on his bed, leaning against the headboard, bare legs stretched out on the blue covers that matched his eyes. Illya took the glass and swirled the liquid around in the bottom. He swung his legs onto the floor and stood so briefly he almost hadn’t stood at all, raising his glass with a little smile.

‘ _Dai Bozhe_ , Napoleon,’ he said, then downed the entire contents of the glass.

‘You’re supposed to sip it,’ Napoleon commented, pouring him out another measure. ‘But cheers.’

‘My feet are cold,’ Illya said cryptically.

Napoleon gave a small snort of laughter and tossed a crumpled towel over Illya’s bare feet. He sipped decorously at his own drink, sitting on his own bed, watching the amber gold tones shift and swirl as he set currents moving in the liquid. He thought of how Illya had run from him like a cat when he had kissed him, how he had disappeared into the evening, how he had found him huddled on the beach looking like just another rock with his arms around his knees and his head cast down. Illya seemed so different here, as if somehow whatever carapace he hid behind had become thin, translucent,  _ almost  _ showing through to something else beneath. He felt as if he were seeing back through time, perhaps, seeing a younger Illya, someone less sure of himself and his place in the world. He seemed so vulnerable that Napoleon was afraid of causing a crack with every breath.

Of course he hoped that the scotch would ease things. He remembered long nights in New York when they had lounged in his fourth floor apartment and run through the liquor cabinet from A to Z, always finishing with vodka and slurred toasts. They started off those nights decorously, sitting nicely on the sofa, talking of surface things, and then as the hours wore on they would move closer. Their bones would seem to become more supple, Illya’s cheeks would become pinker and his hair disarrayed because he ran his fingers through it whenever he became passionate on a subject, and the more he drank the more passionate he became. And always their conversation would slip from topics of daily life and work and culture to deeper things, to thoughts and feelings and longings and desires. Sometimes he couldn’t even remember what they had spoken about, but when he woke the next morning with an aching head to find Illya sprawled and snoring in the spare bed, he would always know it had been something profound.

So now, yes, of course he hoped that the alcohol would help to ease things, to open Illya out. He wanted to soften him and loosen his tongue. He wanted him not to hurt. God, how he wanted Illya not to hurt. He always hated it when Illya seemed to be hurting. Maybe that was love.

He poured Illya another glass and rested back on his own bed and drank his own drink, and he just watched Illya. His friend didn’t seem inclined to talking. He didn’t seem inclined to anything but sitting there with the glass in his hands, tracing a finger along the rounded rim, his eyes far away as if in memory.

‘Illya, I kissed you because I love you,’ Napoleon said after his third drink. Those words were surprisingly easy to say.

Illya looked at him, and he caught the strangest moment, a look in Illya’s eyes as if he had just taken a step and realised there was nothing underfoot. Then Illya said, ‘I know, Napoleon. I just – don’t know how to – ’

And then he put his empty glass down on the night stand and put his hand over the top when Napoleon made to pour another drink, and said, ‘It’s very late, Napoleon. I think it would be a good idea to turn in. Save some of that for tomorrow.’

  


((O))

  


They were in separate beds, Napoleon in his bed, Illya in the other. Illya lay turned towards the window, listening to the soft sound of the waves, with the taste of the scotch still lying in his mouth. He thought Napoleon was asleep. He half wished this were one of those small hotel rooms with a double bed, so they would be forced to share. He had always liked sharing with Napoleon, just to feel that warm weight of someone else in bed with him. He always slept better, always felt more reassured. But tonight he really didn’t know if he wanted to be with Napoleon or be alone. He felt more alone than before, more trapped in the shell of his own body, as if his brief physical closeness with Napoleon had just reminded him of his long-standing physical isolation.

He remembered all those nights sleeping close together with Philip, tangled together with him either in his own narrow single bed or in Philip’s, the walls lined with books whichever room they were in. It was a rare treat to go away somewhere and share a double, a rare treat to have the space to be able to roll away. He never really wanted to roll away. He loved sleeping up against Philip, his arm flung over his flank, his chest pressed against Philip’s back, hips against his behind, legs entwining. He loved the heat that built between them and the slick of sweat and the scent and the salty taste of the patch of skin just behind Philip’s ear, where Illya’s nose and mouth would rest. He had thought that would be forever. The silk of Philip’s skin, the thud of his heart, the little alien sounds of his digestive system working. He thought he would always be able to run his fingers through Philip’s clean brown hair. He thought he would always be able to lay kisses on his slim belly, to touch his lips to his soft cock and the cool ridged skin of his balls. He thought that all of Philip would be his, for always, and, oh, he loved him still. He loved him still, despite the pain and the betrayal and that awful feeling of having his heart wrenched apart. He loved him still.

And then there was Napoleon, just a few feet away. Napoleon... How he loved Napoleon. He didn’t know what to think about what had happened. He shouldn’t have done it. That kiss should never have happened. But it had been beautiful, so beautiful. Perhaps it was right. He hadn’t allowed himself to get close to anyone since Philip, not beyond friendship, but an agent’s partnership was almost like a marriage. There was such trust, such closeness. He and Napoleon could finish each other’s sentences. He trusted Napoleon with his life, and Napoleon did him. And he loved him. God, how he loved him. Would it be so bad to take that love through to its fullest extent? He wanted to. He wanted so much to hold himself against Napoleon’s heat and share that intimate joy.

That ridiculous koala was sitting on the night stand, its eyes shining faintly in the dark room. Feeling rather foolish, he reached out a hand and tugged that soft toy under the blankets and held it against his chest. It felt very small and lifeless against him, but the warmth of the synthetic fur was ridiculously comforting. Then Napoleon said, ‘Illya, you don’t need that. I’m much warmer, and much more alive.’

His heart skipped. ‘I didn’t know you were awake,’ he murmured.

‘I could hardly sleep. Did you know that when you brood your brood fills the entire room?’ Napoleon asked.

‘Oh,’ Illya said. ‘I’m sorry.’

He turned over in the bed and saw the edges of Napoleon’s face just caught by the small amount of light from the window. Then Napoleon lifted the covers and patted the narrow space beside him.

‘Why don’t you come aboard, sailor? I promise to keep my hands to myself.’

So Illya slipped out of his own bed and padded across the carpet and got into Napoleon’s. He arranged himself tight against the length of Napoleon’s body, facing him, feeling Napoleon’s breath, the solidity of his body. The mattress creaked and settled.

The koala was a lump between them, and Napoleon said, ‘You think we can put Bruce aside?’

‘Bruce?’ Illya asked. He suddenly felt sleepy. ‘Is that what he’s called?’

‘All Australians are called Bruce. Didn’t you know?’ Napoleon replied. Then he snuggled his arm over Illya’s side, keeping his hand very definitely high up on his back with no hint of sexual interest, and rested his forehead softly against Illya’s forehead, and the contact was so warm and reassuring that Illya went from thinking he would never sleep again to drifting off into dreams.

  


((O))

  


He woke feeling jittery, feeling full of something that he couldn’t name. He turned his face towards the window and saw that it was pressed by the sun, but that meant so little. The sun rose so early at these latitudes, at this time of year. So he turned his eyes to the little travel alarm clock, the folding travel alarm clock in the green case that had been with him to so many places. The mechanism ticked so rapidly it felt like insect legs tapping at his skull, but the hands were steady, showing almost half past seven.

And then he felt the heat at his back, the solidity all along him. He felt Napoleon there, hard along him, every inch of him warm and real. Napoleon was so deep in sleep it was hardly like lying with a real person, but his breath was hot and alive, brushing over his neck, and for a moment he felt it so strongly, as if he had slipped back in time, as if he were pressed into his narrow bed in Angel Court and Philip were with him, against him, always going to be there with him.

But this was Napoleon. He shook that ghost out of his head and thought  _ this is Napoleon _ . He couldn’t see him, but every inch of him was different to Philip. It smelt like Napoleon. It was the trace of Napoleon’s aftershave. Napoleon’s sweat. Napoleon’s breath. It wasn’t Philip’s heartbeat that was shivering against his back, it was Napoleon’s, every beat soft and slow and alive. And God, how he loved Napoleon, how he thought he loved him. He remembered a kaleidoscope of times with Napoleon at his side, a history stacking up like leaves of paper, full of conversations and moments and memories. They had spent so much time together, they had been so close, just as he had with Philip. There had been the talking into the night, the laughing so hard that in the morning his muscles were sore, the sharing of alcohol and ideas and company. So many little touches; Napoleon’s arm over his shoulder, Napoleon’s fingers touching his, ever so briefly, their shoulders knocking in the lift on the way up to Waverly’s office, their knees touching on cramped flights or under tables in restaurants. When he thought of how Napoleon let him steal food from his plate he smiled. Who else would he let steal his food?

The jittery feeling coursed through him. He felt as though he wanted to get up, to  _ do _ something; to do something spectacular and stupid and dangerous. His fingers itched with the need for action. And Napoleon was so firm against his back, and then – oh – he could feel the heat and the hardness of Napoleon’s erection pushed right up against his own behind, hot even through the thin cotton of their pyjama trousers. And then he knew exactly what he needed. He needed it so badly. He was so afraid of this commitment but God, he needed physical release. It had been so long. He ached deep down in his body, he ached so intimately. It was a craving that flooded from his loins into his mind, and he turned over in bed, his movement making Napoleon stir, and he reached out a hand to Napoleon’s face.

  


((O))

  


He had forgotten that they had fallen asleep like that, pressed in the same bed, Illya turned towards his chest and snuggled close. Illya had felt almost like a tired child as he fell into sleep, forehead against Napoleon’s forehead, his breath so soft and sweet over Napoleon’s face.

But now he blinked open his eyes to light, to Illya’s face. He saw the kind of glint in Illya’s eyes that he was used to seeing when they were about to depart on a dangerous mission, when Illya had explosives in his backpack that could destroy a whole city block or a gun capable of shooting an enemy at two hundred feet. His eyes were so blue, but there was something else in them, as if they sparked with gold.

And Illya reached out and brushed his fingertips across Napoleon’s cheek, brushed his fringe from his forehead. His mouth was a little open with need. So Napoleon moved his jaw forward, caught Illya’s lips, kissed him softly, still half asleep. He dipped his tongue into the sleep-hot depths of Illya’s mouth, and couldn’t stop a low moan at the beautiful taste of him.

As if that were the permission he had been waiting for, Illya pushed his hands against Napoleon’s chest, rolling him onto his back on the bed, fumbling a hand up under his pyjama shirt and feeling his muscles under his fingertips as if his life depended on it. And then he was slipping his fingers into the waistband of Napoleon’s pyjama trousers, pushing his hand down inside. With that touch all Napoleon’s sleepiness evaporated. All he could feel was Illya’s hands on him. He was flat on the bed and Illya was tugging down his pyjama bottoms. Illya was astride his legs, his hands so busy tracing over Napoleon’s flesh. Then Illya’s head dipped down, his mouth was on him, hot and wet and so hungry, and Napoleon gasped and arched his hips, the sensations sending electricity through his belly and thighs.

And then Illya was pushing down his own pyjama trousers, and he was naked underneath them, naked and hard, and his cock was so beautiful. Illya ground himself against Napoleon’s hardness, clenched their two lengths together in his broad, warm hand, and he moved, thrust, pumped both cocks together in the tunnel of his hand. It felt incredible, so incredible, the heat and hardness of Illya’s flesh all along his, the soft skin slipping over such resolute steel, the feeling of Illya’s body over his. Illya’s mouth coming down to kiss along his jawline, his neck, the pale triangle of chest exposed by the open neck of his pyjama shirt. His higher brain tried to make him think, tried to send small thoughts out, asking if he should be doing this with Illya; but then Illya’s hand would harden, he pressed so hot and beautiful against Napoleon’s cock, he was making such beautiful little sounds, little gasps, as he thrust, his lips parted and his teeth just showing, and then – God. Everything burst, expanded, a supernova glow in Napoleon’s mind, a thrill tightening every nerve of his body, and he was coming in jerks, Illya’s hand still around them both, Illya’s cock jerking too and Illya groaning out a sound of perfect gratification.

Illya was lying on top of him. Their pyjama shirts were sticky between them. Illya was panting out long, slow breaths that were hot on Napoleon’s neck and the fingers of one hand were intertwined with Napoleon’s fingers, and his other hand was still between them, tangled around their softening cocks. And then Illya moved, rolled his body away from Napoleon’s, his fingers coming free, and there was a thump, and he was suddenly lying on the floor.

Napoleon turned onto his side with a jerk to look over the edge of the bed.

‘Illya, are you okay?’

Illya was lying there with his pyjama trousers pushed down around his thighs and his shirt rucked up and his hair all over the place, and he just stared up at the ceiling, his blue eyes looking slightly glazed and distant.

‘Illya?’ Napoleon asked again.

Then he shook himself and said in a far away voice, ‘Yes, Napoleon. Yes, I’m all right.’

‘That was a good thump.’

‘I’m all right,’ he repeated.

‘That was one hell of a wake up call,’ Napoleon said, and Illya didn’t reply.

Napoleon lay on his side on the bed regarding Illya, trying to work him out. After that raw and uninhibited time on the bed Illya had become as enigmatic as a cat again.

‘You’re not regretting this, are you?’ Napoleon asked warily, because if Illya didn’t regret it then he couldn’t, he could never regret such an experience. He wanted to do it again and again.

‘N-o,’ Illya said rather unsteadily.

Napoleon raised an eyebrow. ‘You sure?’

Illya sat up then and smiled, an odd little smile that lifted only one side of his mouth.

‘I’m sure, Napoleon,’ he said. ‘I don’t regret it. It was – I needed that. I needed you.’

Napoleon looked at him with great seriousness in his eyes. ‘Illya, I will always be here when you need me.’

A small snort burst from Illya’s nose, a kind of suppressed laugh, and Napoleon said quickly, ‘You  _ know _ what I mean. Not just for that. For all of it. Everything. Not just sex, Illya. Everything.’

And Illya looked up at him then, and for a moment a great tenderness shone through from his blue eyes. ‘Thank you, Napoleon,’ he said. Then he glanced over at the door to the en suite and said, ‘Maybe we should wash. We should definitely wash. Shave. Get dressed. We’ll be late for breakfast.’

Napoleon still felt oddly uncertain about Illya’s reaction. He still couldn’t really read him. But he nodded and said, ‘Yeah, I guess we should wash up, at that.’

  


((O))

  


The E-type was beautiful, silver-grey, with a curving bonnet that seemed to stretch forever before the windscreen. It was all beautiful, really. Illya had organised the hire of the car almost as soon as he had got up, telling Napoleon that he had heard of a better beach than the one Napoleon proposed, but that it was further away. He seemed so changed this morning, fired up, almost manic. He was into the shower before Napoleon had finished stretching his limbs, he dressed and shaved while Napoleon was standing under a torrent of water laving himself with soap, he ventured down for breakfast while Napoleon was still stood before the mirror with a beard of shaving cream. It didn’t quite seem that Illya was avoiding him, but that he was somehow avoiding himself, making himself so busy he didn’t have time to think.

The road was narrow and winding, and it clung to the edges of the coast like a snake crawling around a jagged rock. The sea sparkled on their right. The mountains rose to their left, green with bracken and purple-red with heather. The sheep looked like fat maggots, almost motionless on the steep slopes, and out on the sea a few sailing boats cut through the bright water. When they were still the sun was so hot that it burned, but Illya kept his foot firmly on the accelerator, and the salt breeze riffled through Napoleon’s hair.

‘We would have been sunbathing by now if we’d gone to  _ my _ beach,’ he couldn’t help but say.

‘We would,’ Illya said, not taking his eyes from the road. ‘And isn’t this better?’

Napoleon laughed, because Illya was right. It was better. It was dynamic and beautiful, and Illya looked so alive in the driving seat, the wind toying with his blond hair and his blue eyes so focussed on the road. He sat in silence for a while, just watching the scenery whip past, until he felt brave enough to risk the question, ‘Do you feel like telling me about your bad memories, Illya?’

Illya’s lips pressed together, but he didn’t falter on the road.

‘No, Napoleon,’ he said.

So Napoleon cautiously reached out a hand and touched it very lightly to Illya’s thigh. He could feel the muscles moving beneath the skin as Illya braked lightly to take the next corner and then moved his foot to the clutch as he changed gear.

‘What about this?’ he asked, just letting his fingers rest there softly. ‘You made love with me this morning, Illya. Do you feel like talking about that?’

Illya’s laugh was odd then, almost harsh. ‘We hardly made love,’ he said. ‘We fucked.’

‘Is that what you want to believe?’

Illya didn’t answer. His eyes were very steady on the road. His hands were so firm on the steering wheel that his knuckles were white. If it weren’t for the pallor of his knuckles he would just look as if he were concentrating on the driving. But Napoleon knew that Illya rarely needed to concentrate that hard on his driving. It was second nature to him.

‘Well, we fucked,’ Napoleon shrugged. ‘Perhaps you fucked. But there was love there too, wasn’t there? It wasn’t a case of  _ any port in a storm _ ?’

Illya’s shoulders softened a little, and he flexed his hands.

‘No, Napoleon,’ he acceded. ‘No, you are not a port. I – hope that’s not what I am to you.’

Napoleon increased the pressure on Illya’s thigh, stroking once. Then he removed his hand.

‘No, Illya. You would never be  _ any port in a storm _ . Never a last resort. I would rather make love with you than fuck you.’

Illya smiled a little, and it was like the sun pushing through clouds on a dull day. He seemed relieved.

‘Well, then,’ Illya said.

‘No regrets?’ Napoleon asked, and Illya hesitated just a little too long. But then the Russian inclined his head and said, ‘No regrets. I don’t regret  _ that _ , Napoleon. It was very necessary.’

_ Necessary,  _ Napoleon thought.  _ Any port in a storm _ ran through his head again. Sometimes he wondered about Illya, about where he kept his emotions and when he let them out. He was capable of being so practical, so cold. But he didn’t think that Illya would do something so intimate without at least some emotional attachment; at least, not with such a close friend.

Napoleon cleared his throat, then asked, ‘And – are we going to do it again?’

Illya looked at him, very briefly, then back at the road. The vision of his blue eyes imprinted itself into Napoleon’s mind. It was as if Illya were still looking at him even though he was looking back at the road.

‘ _ The future is there, poised over the street, hardly more dim than the present. What advantage will accrue from its realisation? _ ’ Illya intoned.

Napoleon grimaced. ‘You can quote Sartre at me all you like,  _ tovarisch _ , but what I really want to know is if I will have the joy of realising your sweet body in the future.’

Illya’s smile was enigmatic. ‘Would you rather I sang Doris Day to you?’ he asked, then began very gently, ‘ _ Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be. The future’s not ours to see. Que sera, sera _ .’

‘As long as this drive doesn’t turn into The Birds, you can sing as long as you like,’ Napoleon promised. Illya’s voice was surprisingly sweet.

‘Wrong film,’ Illya said. ‘But I will hope we will not emulate Mr Hitchcock’s art in any way.’

‘You were afraid we’d made a mistake, kissing in the bathroom,’ Napoleon said.

‘Yes,’ Illya admitted. ‘Yes, I was.’

‘And do you think we did?’

Illya’s eyes were narrowed. He was watching the car in front, a little Volkswagen Beetle trundling along at far too slow a pace. He was watching the curves of the road and the oncoming traffic. And then suddenly he stepped on the accelerator and smoothly pulled out onto the opposite carriageway, and slipped past the Beetle then back into the left hand lane.

‘I don’t know if it was a mistake,’ he said. ‘But it is done. The past has no mercy on the future. And it was good, Napoleon. It felt good.’

‘And the fucking?’

Illya smiled. ‘That felt good too. Very good. I’d almost forgotten how – ’

And he stopped, and Napoleon could see just how close Illya had come to revealing something. The back of the Russian’s neck was going pink. He could intuit so much from that little slip, and Illya’s reaction to it. Perhaps all of his intuitions were wrong, but he thought not. He didn’t know every fact of Illya’s past, but he knew Illya’s personality, the way he was. He was almost certain that Illya had been involved with a man in the past. Illya had eyes for women. He had been out with a few since Napoleon had known him. But Napoleon was certain that that bitten off sentence and the hot flush colouring his neck and now his ears was because he had almost revealed something of his past with a man.

  


((O))

  


‘So, who was he?’ Napoleon asked in a tone of great insouciance as they lay side by side on fine yellow sand.

Illya stared up into the cloudless sky. The zenith was so deep, so high, it made him feel dizzy. It was as if he were lying magnetised to the sand and looking down into an endless space. If he let go he would fall forever. But the sand was hot under his body and the sun melted into his bones, and if only Napoleon would let him be this could be such a peaceful place.

‘I was right about this beach,’ he said.

‘The beach is perfect,’ Napoleon agreed, ‘but who was he, Illya? Who was this man?’

Illya stretched himself out on the sand, twisting his torso a little. It felt so good to have his skin mostly naked under the sun. It wasn’t the perfect blissful heat of the Black Sea, or of New York in the summertime, but it was heat enough. He turned his head sideways and saw that Napoleon was watching him, watching every flex of his muscles like a cat watching prey. Well, Napoleon could watch.

He pushed himself up and started down towards the shallow edge of the sea. The sand was pale and clean. Sheets of rough rock rose up to break its perfection, covered in green and purple-red seaweed, in limpets, in sand tossed by the waves and in hopeful gulls. He walked past them all and into the sea. The shallows were warm on his feet, on his ankles. He waded deeper and it started to feel a little more chilly, but it was all right. The skin of his thighs goose pimpled, but it was all right. He pushed further, and the water was up his thighs, suddenly washing through his trunks, and the feeling was so fresh and liberating. He wished he could swim naked.

He plunged his whole body in then, and held in the gasp he wanted to make as the chill enveloped him. As soon as he was moving it was all right. He cut through the water with strong strokes, making for a ridge of barnacled rock that rose up out of the sea. At low tide it would be part of the land, but right now it was an island.

The water was clear and beautiful, and the purple-red colours of the seaweed on the rocks were so striking against the blond blue of the sand and water. Black and white oyster catchers rose as he pressed his hands against the rough rock and hauled himself up, using his gymnast’s upper body strength to bring himself out of the clinging water in one swift movement. The sun struck him again, its warmth pressing into him, and he sat atop a cushioning swathe of seaweed and drew his knees up to his body and hugged them in his arms.

The sun sparkled on the water. He could see a ferry pressing out from behind the headland, making for Dublin, no doubt. Little figures of people thronged the rails. It was beautiful here but he was struck with a nomadic urge to swim out to that ferry and be hauled aboard and travel onwards, onwards, to another place.

But Napoleon was still on the beach. He couldn’t run from him. He was running from memories and grief, and there was nowhere to go to lose them. They were like his skin, always with him.

Damn Philip. How was it that he was still there, still at his shoulder, still affecting his life? How could he be making this ache in him, making it ache so fiercely, when he hadn’t even set eyes on him in years? It would be better if one could excise past lovers like a tumour; but then, tumours spread, tumours grew back, tumours took apart people’s lives.

It had been so strange, that last night in Lyme Regis. He hadn’t even known where he was going. He had walked and walked, walked away. Philip hadn’t followed. It had been getting late and he knew it was stupid to walk off down the beach like that, but he did it anyway, needed to do it. The tide was slowly seeping outwards and he trudged over stones that changed from golden flint gravel to bigger, greyer chunks. The waves were no more than little, languid surges reaching over and through the stones with a soft hiss. The cliffs rose to his right; great, heavy black tomes of mud turning to shale, mud pressing on mud until the great weight turned it to stone. You could pull apart some of the rocks here with your bare hands. You could see mud becoming rock, crack it open and find an ammonite curled within. Here was where the Victorians came face to face with their gods and discovered them to be lies, where they started to lose their faith and look to science instead. Here was where time was so deep it was beyond comprehension, where one could fall to one’s knees and rifle through the stones and come up with a sleeping relic of a time before humans walked the earth.

And he walked. The cliffs were dark and the sea was darkening and the beach was a grey strip between. There were places where the mud had lost its grip and come down in huge chunks, trees still clinging to what had been solid ground, their roots tangled and exposed, their salt-poisoned branches black and bare. The stones crunched. He found his way around great boulders with the outline of ammonites pressing from their surfaces, their curves softened to a tactile beauty by the relentless sea. He crouched and smoothed his hand over those curves and tried to feel how insignificant his life was against that vast age and those poor blind creatures immortalised in stone, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t feel it. All he felt was pain. It was so strong, so sharp. It was like a knife in his throat, twisting in his chest.  _ Philip... _ He couldn’t lose him. How could he lose him? They had been fine, the future was supposed to be good for them. He felt like something washed up by the tide, something inert rolled and thrown against the coastal boulders by a sea that didn’t care. He thought of sea anemones and starfish and jellyfish, creatures ravaged and thrown about by the currents and the tides, and he envied them their boneless, brainless existence. Wouldn’t it all be easier if there were no brain, if there were no heart?

He stumbled onwards, toes kicking the stones. His shoes would be ruined. What did that matter? What did any of it matter? He stepped onto a broad, flat expanse of rock and sat, almost fell, down onto his haunches. And he groaned. He groaned loud and deep. There was no one to hear. He pushed the sound up from his gut, from deep in his stomach, like a birthing animal pushing the pain out of its body. He pressed his forehead down so hard onto his knees that the bone ached, and then he cried. It was shameful, so shameful, but he cried as if he were trying to shake all of the soft tissue from his body and leave only his bones behind. He cried until his throat retched and he heaved dryly over the stone and held in the vomit with a terrific force of will. He felt as though he were empty anyway. There was nothing left. He lifted his head and there were no tears and there was nothing inside. He was just hollow and aching and empty, a sea urchin casing bleached out and tumbled over the sands, brittle and thin and fragile. There was nothing left.

He looked around himself, cast his head around, realised that the wide sheet of stone he was sitting on was starred with the whorls of ammonites, great ones as wide as an armchair cushion, ones as small as his hand. They were all around him, silent, ancient, frozen, just lying there half exposed after millennia of scouring waves and winds and sand. He pushed out his aching legs and slumped down his aching back, and he lay there on the chilling stone. The sky was clear and deep and dark and pierced with stars. They looked so cold, so remote. They were more ancient than anything, than the ammonites, the rock, the planet that revolved slowly beneath him. And they didn’t care. They were blind and cold and far away, and, like all of nature, they didn’t care. If he walked away into the water, the water wouldn’t care. It would just take him down and roll him and grind him against the rocky shore, and after a while he would be gone.

He lay there far too long, his spine growing stiff and cold against the solid rock. His fingertips were resting on an ammonite outline, swirling over and over its soft lines in a kind of tic. The stroking gave him an anchor. It soothed him. He lay and stared up at the stars that were brightening in the darkening sky. A few clouds were ragged and silver-edged in the light of the moon. The waves kept slurring onto the stone. And then he jerked upright and realised that the tide had reached its lower limit and was creeping back in again to shore. He realised it was so dark now that the only guiding light was the moonlight that highlighted the ridges of rocks. He rolled onto his side and stared across the cold stone, and then he pushed himself to his knees and to his feet. He walked, stumbling, back along the beach, hands grasping for the boulders when his feet slipped. Once he tumbled over and struck his knee so hard on a rock that the pain brought tears to his eyes, and he sat there for a moment breathing in hard and watching the silvered ripples of the sea and pulling his fingers through the broken stones. His fingertips drew over something rippled and water worn, and he pulled out a fossil, a beautiful one by the feel of it, and he held it tight in his fist and wondered if one could wish on a fossil as one could on a shooting star.

When he got back to the hotel his feet were wet and his knee throbbed and there was a blood stain through the fabric of his slacks. Every muscle ached and his eyes were hot and tired, and he stumbled into their room and saw Philip there on top of the covers on the bed, still fully dressed, fast asleep. And he stood there and watched him in the dim light, watching his breath moving in and out, watching the way his fist was curled up near his face. He saw the straight, bony line of his nose and the fall of his fringe over his forehead, and his glasses lying askew on the night stand. He saw the line of his body like the ridge of a long hill, his hip thrusting up a little, his legs sloping down to feet still in grey socks. He bit down on the lurching need to shake him awake and kiss him and cajole him and plead with him and try to make all of this all come right again. He knew Philip. He knew him so well, every crease and fold and rise and fall of him like a familiar landscape, every turn of his mind, the way he said every word, the feeling of his fingertips and the taste of his mouth. He knew all of him, and he knew that he could not plead.

He moved around the room, gathering up his things, pushing them into his suitcase in silence. He found everything, he thought. The few books he had brought, all his clothes, his hair brush and shaving kit, walking boots and reading glasses. And then he folded his suitcase closed, and he slipped out of the room.

He walked out into the still, dark town and stood on the street with his suitcase in his hand, and he didn’t know what to do or where to go. It was late, too late for a bus, certainly too late for a train on the little branch line that ran to Axminster. So he walked, starting up the steep, steep hill that led out of the town, and he walked on into the quiet country, limping on his painful knee, until eventually a lorry rumbled up behind him and he stuck out his thumb and mercifully the driver picked him up. He sat in the lorry’s cab almost in silence, affecting an English accent when he was required to speak to deflect the inevitable questions. He didn’t want to talk but he didn’t want to think, either. He watched the glistening tarmac speeding towards the bonnet in the light of the headlamps and tried to think of nothing at all. He tried to think about the thesis he would have to defend in a few months’ time, he thought about what he would do when he had those letters after his name to add to the BSc and MSc he already possessed. He thought about the black road and the dark waves and the smooth ammonite under his fingers in his pocket, and he let the rumbling vibration of the engine soothe him. He was dropped off outside Axminster station and he spent most of the night on a cold bench, slipping into sleep, waking, shivering, trying not to think. He didn’t know what would happen when Philip followed him back to Cambridge. He didn’t want to know.

He ached for Philip. It had been so long, but he ached for him. He sat on this seaweed covered rock staring out over the Irish Sea, and he ached. The ferry had passed out of sight, the tide had risen a little. He had been sitting so still that a cormorant had alighted on the other end of the rock and was watching him with a beady, critical eye. He tossed a pebble towards it and watched it flap away on arching black wings.

The sun was hot on his skin and he was almost totally dry except for the dark layers underneath the surface of his hair. It was very hot here, and he was thirsty. They had beer and lemonade in the basket back on the beach. He turned, feeling stiff for moving after so long of stillness. The back of his neck felt burnt. Napoleon was still there on the sand, sitting on their picnic blanket, his chin resting on his hands and his eyes directed straight at Illya. Illya raised a hand, feeling as though he were reconnecting with the present, and then he stood up on the rock and stared into the depths, and dived smoothly into the water.

  


((O))

  


Napoleon watched Illya on the rock, sitting like the little mermaid of Copenhagen, and with the same amount of pensive preoccupation in the lines of his body. He wished he were not so far away. He could easily swim out to that rock, although he didn’t share Illya’s fish-like love of the water, but he knew that even if he did forge out there and haul himself up Illya would still be unreachable. Even when he was quite happy Illya could seem unreachable. Now he seemed to be drifting, so lost in memory or trauma or whatever it was affecting him.

It maddened him that he couldn’t coax Illya into talking to him. When one tried to coax Illya, unless it were done with great care, he shut up like a clam. He risked pushing him even further away. There were times over the last two days that he had sensed if he’d pushed any harder Illya would have run like a feral cat.

So he sat and watched, and when the watching bored him he looked around the beach, at the rocky headlands, at the glittering water, at the wheeling birds. There was a heap of rock with a building on it, white walled, a fantasy house, it seemed. He imagined what it would be like if he and Illya were staying there, far from other people, alone at night with no sound but waves and gulls. Perhaps he would eke something from Illya then, but he doubted it.

And then after a long time Illya straightened up, stretched his spine like a cat, looked around, and over all that distance seemed to look straight into Napoleon’s eyes. He lifted his hand in a single gesture of human connection, and the relief that rose in Napoleon was like a long out breath calming his body. Then Illya rose up, sleek and taut and tanned, his body so briefly covered by the trunks, and he focussed himself, and then executed a shallow dive into the swaying water on the near side of the rock.

Napoleon watched for him, briefly anxious, but then he rose, smooth and dark-haired like a seal, further from the rock than Napoleon had expected him to be. He trod water for a moment, shaking water out of his hair and passing a hand over his face, and then he struck out in a perfect crawl towards the shore. Napoleon was entranced. It was like watching something perfect, like watching geometry turned to flesh and muscle and bone. There was an irrefutable perfection there. He imagined that a Greek philosopher would look at Illya and see that he  _ was,  _ that he existed without question. An Italian artist of the Renaissance would carve him in marble, would take cold stone and render it living with muscles and veins. A novelist would create a perfect stream of consciousness piece about how he was part of all of nature, eternal and ephemeral together. Perfect.

Illya was standing before him, dripping, grains of sand clinging to his ankles, his hair starting to lighten again as the sun burned the sea water from the strands.

‘Lunch,’ he was saying, and Napoleon blinked. ‘Napoleon, when I’m dried off we can have lunch. Are you listening to me?’

Napoleon looked him up and down and fought down the need to roll him onto the sand and fuck him right here. His own swimming trunks hid very little from view.

‘Yeah,’ he said, fumbling for the picnic basket. ‘Yes. Lunch.’ He tossed a towel at the Russian. ‘Use that. You’re dripping on my feet. I’ll set out our wares.’

When Napoleon opened the picnic basket the koala was there, nestled in with the food, and Illya laughed.

Illya ate as if he hadn’t eaten for days, and Napoleon worked very hard at not watching him, at making sure he ate at least some of his own share of the food. Then he levered the lid from a beer bottle and handed it to Illya, and this time he did watch him, he watched him tip his head back, watched his hair fall off his forehead, watched the vulnerable length of his throat and his Adam’s apple bobbing as he sated his thirst.

‘You’re taking on the hue of a lobster on your shoulders,’ he commented critically.

He drew out a bottle of sun lotion and without asking he started to massage it into Illya’s shoulders and the back of his neck. Illya leaned into the touch and didn’t complain, but he didn’t offer to return the favour. It wasn’t unfriendliness, Napoleon thought, but simply Illya’s deep preoccupation. It was an affliction that fell over him often.

‘Thank you, Napoleon,’ Illya said, well after Napoleon had finished applying his own lotion and had wiped his hands clean.

‘No problem,’ Napoleon said, because it was no hardship at all to touch Illya like that.

Illya threw himself down on the rug, turning his newly protected back and neck to the sun. Napoleon wanted to pretend he’d seen a missed spot, to have an excuse to rub more lotion into his skin. But he didn’t. He just turned himself over too and lay beside Illya, and waited and hoped.

Eventually Illya said, ‘Napoleon, have you ever had a relationship that lasted longer than a few weeks?’

Napoleon thought back. He thought through the glittering conquests he had made, some more serious than others. Like Illya, he didn’t feel inclined to tell even his closest friend everything he had done. There were things in Korea...

He shook himself. Illya didn’t need to know everything about Korea. He said, ‘I’ve had a share of serious relationships, Illya, but I think my longest partnership has been with you.’

He squinted sideways and saw what he hoped for; a half smile on Illya’s face.

‘This is different,’ Illya said, and Napoleon shrugged.

‘Up until now. Up until now it’s been a marriage without the sex. But now?’

He hoped he hadn’t gone too far, but he didn’t see any sign of Illya shutting down.

‘Yes,’ Illya said eventually. ‘I suppose it has been. We have rather been in each other’s pockets.’

‘If I had to be in anyone’s pocket, I would choose yours,’ Napoleon said. ‘Aside from anything else, you carry very useful things.’ The silence was warm and companionable, and then Napoleon said, ‘Yes, I’ve had a few serious relationships. Some very serious.’

Illya didn’t turn to look at him. He carried on looking at the tartan of the blanket and pushing about a few grains of sand on there, and fiddling with a broken mussel shell. ‘And when they didn’t work out?’

Napoleon shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I guess I moved on. I was never sure about settling anyway. I suppose with a couple I mourned it out, I fucked it out, maybe. I drank a little. Never too much.’

‘Do you still miss them?’ Illya asked.

Napoleon dropped his forehead onto the blanket. It was as if Illya were picking scabs from wounds he had forgotten he ever had.

‘Sometimes,’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t think anyone’s well adjusted enough not to have some regrets about the past.’

‘Ah,’ Illya said, slowly, quietly. Then he said, ‘No, I suppose not. Perhaps that’s how you’d characterise a psychopath.’

Napoleon turned his head sideways, resting his cheek on the soft acrylic blanket and gazing at the blond curtain of hair over the side of Illya’s forehead, at his dark lashes with sandy tips, at the blue iris of the one eye that he could see, that was even more brilliant for the oblique angle of the sun through its depths.

‘I don’t know, Illya,’ he said. ‘I never studied psychology. I just feel that everyone has some parts of their life they’d rather not go back to again.’

‘Ah,’ Illya said again, and he closed his eyes and laid his head down. He lay there a long while, silent, but his fingers were still moving on the broken mussel shell, the pad of his finger circling slowly in its mother of pearl interior. ‘If I could go back...’ he said eventually, but he didn’t complete that thought.

Napoleon lay there, regarding him. Illya had never struck him as the kind of person to want to go back. Sometimes he seemed full of his past, as if there were a seething mass of events and reactions just below the surface of his skin, but he never seemed to be the type to wish himself back to those times. He took things as they came, with a Slavic joy or a Slavic doom, and then he moved on to the next thing. He was certain that this was a person, a single person, a single man. Someone had taken Illya and got beneath those tight, high shields, and then he had betrayed him. He didn’t know what he would do if he came face to face with the man who had done that.

  


((O))

  


Illya had been so tired as he travelled back to Cambridge. A milk train had come through very early in the morning, and he got on board one of the carriages and sat in an empty compartment feeling dazed as the great metal milk churns were trundled along the platform outside his window and loaded further down the train with heavy clanks. The very idea of the busy legions of Londoners wanting milk just seemed bizarre. What was milk anyway, when this terrible schism had occurred? Why would a red faced London child sitting at a breakfast table want milk to pour on her cereal? Why would her father, sitting behind his newspaper fortress, want milk in his tea? Didn’t they know about Philip? Why hadn’t the cows refused to give down their milk from their full udders? How was it even that the fireman had managed to stoke the boiler in the powerful engine ahead of him, and that the driver could coax the train into movement?

But it moved. It did move at last. A man shouted and walked back past the window giving a cheerful salute to someone. A whistle blew. And then the engine hissed and steam billowed and the carriage gave a sudden jerk, and the dawn-dim station started to slide out of view.

Illya sat there on his high-backed seat and watched the station leave him, through hot, tired eyes. The whole world seemed to be in movement now, and he was the only thing that was still, the dead weight at the centre of all things. He was the nucleus of a solar system and out there, near, Axminster moved away in stately fashion. The houses spun away and gave way to fields. The trees peeled back and left him. Miles away Philip was adrift, asleep in his hotel bed, unconscious that he was falling out of orbit and tumbling into the void. Or was it Illya who was the void? Perhaps that was it. He was nothing now, without even the gravity of a pebble, and everything was drifting away. He had no power to make anything cling to him, not even Philip, who he thought would be there for eternity.

He sat there in the compartment, feeling the rumbling and lurches of the movement over the rails, head lolling back against the antimacassar, eyes drifting open and closed. He was so tired, and his knee hurt; it throbbed and ached and stiffened as he sat there. He rolled up his trouser leg and examined the purpling bruise and bloody graze, then folded the fabric down again and tried to feel the pain in his knee more than the pain in his chest.

The dawn was so delicate across the rolling West Country, the sun catching dew in glittering gold, mist hanging in valleys, cows standing in fields staring patiently into gauzy air. It had been so beautiful it had felt like a knife twisting between his ribs. He had sat there, and the rising sun brought tears into his eyes. It must have been the brightness, that gold, dazzling brightness, that made his eyes prickle with tears.

And then the compartment door slid open and he jerked his head around to see a man in a cap looking in on him, and for a moment his heart lurched because he was half blind from looking at the sun and his thoughts were half gone, and he saw a tall Russian railway official standing there, and he almost addressed him as  _ tovarisch,  _ almost felt that flutter of fear he had used to feel as an undergraduate student, unsure of himself, unsure of whether he would be able to find his ticket, of whether he had done something wrong, anything, without even realising. 

‘Ticket, please,’ the man said. He was holding out his clippers and looking down at Illya with a blank expression, the expression of a man who worked very early in the morning and always with strangers.

Illya fumbled in his pocket and drew out his ticket and smiled as he handed it to the man. That broke the ice, and the ticket inspector said, ‘Not many on here this time of the morning. Only you and a pair of ladies two down. Quiet.’

‘Yes,’ Illya said. ‘Yes, it is very early.’

His accent was stronger because he was so distracted and so caught up in his thoughts, which still ran in Ukrainian in his head so much of the time.

‘Tourist, are you?’

‘Student,’ Illya murmured. He was used to saying that. ‘Cambridge.’ Then he rubbed his face and said, ‘Yes, I suppose a tourist. A holiday in Lyme Regis. I’m finishing my PhD.’

He was, wasn’t he? That was what he was doing; that was what he must do. He must go back to Cambridge and focus on his PhD and not – not think of Philip. How could he not think of Philip?

And then the inspector was sitting down on the seats opposite and stretching his legs out and tipping his cap back and saying, ‘Ah, Lyme. Busy there nowadays. Mother were born there, tight by the sea. Getting so young folks don’t want to live in backwaters like that, though. Where did you come from, then? Russian, by that accent.’

‘Yes,’ Illya nodded, then qualified, ‘Ukrainian.’

‘Rum place, the Soviet Union, isn’t it? Full of spies?’

Illya looked up at him, rather bewildered. ‘It is my home,’ he said.

Kyiv, his home. Warm, bright Kyiv, his parents’ flat in the big block, the park across the road, his mother singing songs absently as she dressed for work, his father standing shaving at the kitchen sink. Kyiv. He could never have brought Philip there, not and been honest about how they were with each other. Not like that.

He looked at the ticket inspector’s shoes, his legs, his knees; anywhere but his face. His eyes burned with tiredness. He wished he could sleep. Perhaps if he were left alone...

He made his accent thicker still and said, ‘I am sorry, I am very tired. Is it permitted to sleep on the seat?’

So the inspector stood up and shrugged and said, ‘So long as no one else wants to sit there and you keep your shoes off the seat. They don’t haul you off to the gulag here for sleeping on the train, young man.’

Illya had laughed rather uncomfortably at that, and the inspector slid the door closed behind him, and he slipped sideways onto the sprung cushions and felt the rough fabric against his cheek, and with his feet dangling over the edge of the seat he closed his eyes.

  


((O))

  


They took the car back through the mountains on winding roads. Illya’s skin felt raw and hot and the wind blew cool over his face, a wonderful feeling after so long in the sun. He let Napoleon drive and leant his head back and just let the wind stroke through his hair.

‘Hey, Illya.’

He opened his eyes. Napoleon was pulling the car to a halt in a gravelly lay-by. On the left a long lake rippled darkly under a buffeting wind. On the right a mountain rose high above them, a towering tumbled pile of boulders.

‘Mount Snowdon?’ Illya asked, blinking and craning his neck backwards. There was no snow on the slopes at all.

Napoleon laughed. ‘No,  _ tovarisch _ .’ He peered more closely at the map that had been stuffed between the seats. ‘Tri-van, it looks like on the map. I’m sure I’m not saying that right.’

He thrust the rather crumpled map towards his partner. Illya took it and looked at the name written over the closely packed orange contour lines. Tryfan. It was not as high as Snowdon, but still high. This, at least, was different to Dorset. This landscape was more ancient than the Jurassic southern coast. There were no jagged mountains down there. This place was formed from the volcanoes of the Cambrian and the Ordovician periods, and it looked worn by time.

‘Looks like someone just threw down a heap of rubble,’ Illya commented.

‘Big someone. Big heap.’

Napoleon got out of the car and slammed the door, and stood there looking out over the lake. Illya got out too and turned his face to the wind. It blasted over his skin and ran fingers into his hair, and he opened his mouth and let it drive into the back of his throat. The water of the lake was so dark and secret that he almost wanted to strip off his clothes and plunge in. If he disappeared under those waters he might never come up again. It looked like the entrance to another world.

He deliberately turned his back on the lake and the ruffled waters and tilted his head back to look at the mountain instead. The boulders that littered its sides were huge. They seemed to call to him. He looked left and right and darted across the road and scaled a stile that provided access to the slope beyond.

‘Hey!’ Napoleon called, but Illya carried on walking.

The wind was blowing right through his body, it seemed. It was fresh and beautiful on his sun-seared skin. And something jerked in him, like a string being tugged through the flesh of his heart. He remembered going with Philip to the Lake District for a week, one of their earliest holidays together. He remembered climbing tirelessly up the Old Man of Coniston and standing on the summit, looking out over the world below. He remembered the cold of the wind in his lungs that time. He remembered kissing Philip hard at the deserted summit and laughing, his lips hot now but everything else so cold. He had felt so free. He had always felt so free when he was with Philip in places like that, where no one else was, where they connected as if there were a conduit straight between their minds. Sometimes with Philip he didn’t even have to speak. He just looked at him and Philip  _ knew _ .

How amazing it had been in their tent at night, making love in desperate silence with the thin canvas the only thing between them and the world. How amazing it had been in the daytime, stepping from boulder to boulder, watching the flex of the muscles in Philip’s strong calves, watching his throat when he tipped his head back and laughed, watching the light of the early summer sun catching on the hairs of his forearms and showing every plane of his body like a Renaissance sculpture.

‘If I’m a Renaissance sculpture, they need some new models,’ Philip had laughed when Illya had told him that. And perhaps Philip wasn’t exactly that. He was too tall, too lanky. But in the morning when he came out of the tent and stripped his clothes off and ran naked into the chill lake in the golden light of the dawn all Illya could think of was marble statues, and then of bringing Philip’s cold, sculpted flesh back to warmth and life. Making love was a beautiful way to dry off after bathing.

‘Hey, Illya!’

Illya was striding up the grass-tussocked slope, weaving between boulders, some of them as big as huts. A stream ran down the slope, glassy cold with clear water, wetting stones to red-brown and carving a clean channel through the dark earth. Grass roots were bald and white where they had been denuded by the flow. Illya dipped a hand in and drank and gasped at the cold purity of the water, remembering kneeling by a similar stream in the Lake District and scooping water into his mouth to soothe the burning of walking too far too fast up too steep a hill. Sometimes Philip had been hard to keep up with.

‘Illya!’

Napoleon’s voice was a distant thing, thin and snatched by the wind. The mountain rose sheer in front of him. He had no intention of climbing it. He didn’t know what he was doing. But he pushed up onto his feet again and set his eyes on another great age-scoured boulder and used his legs like pistons to reach it. He scrambled up around the back where its top was almost level with the rising slope, and pulled himself onto its smooth grey mass. He dropped himself down onto his back and lay there, arms and legs spread like a starfish, mouth wide, breathing in the cold air while the wind pressed over him, constant and wild.

‘Sometimes I think you’re completely mad,’ Napoleon said, panting, scrabbling onto the rock beside him. Illya turned his head loosely on the rock and saw Napoleon’s ankles, his socks and shoes, the cuffs of his slacks. Then he looked up the dark length of his body to see his face staring down. Napoleon’s face was red and his chest was heaving.

‘Neither of us are exactly dressed for mountaineering,’ Napoleon continued, dropping down onto his haunches beside Illya and putting a hand on his shoulder, warm and firm. ‘How much further were you thinking of going?’

Illya lifted his head from the rock and crunched the muscles of his abdomen to raise himself up a little. Looking down, he was surprised by how far he had come. He had hardly realised how hard he had walked, but the car looked like a silver beetle in the lay-by below, and the lake was a dark, long slab beyond.

‘I’m not going any further,’ he said. His mouth still burned with the cold of the water from that mountain stream. ‘I just had – some energy to burn off.’

He carefully rested his head back on the stone and Napoleon lay back too, so they were head to head. Napoleon lifted a hand to stroke Illya’s sweaty hair from his temple, and very gently he brought his face closer and kissed his lips.

‘You’re a very messed up Russian,’ he said softly, pulling back. ‘Did you know that?’

Illya snorted, but he wished he could close the gap between them again and feel the soft warmth of Napoleon’s lips on his again. Soft or hard, fast or slow, Napoleon was such a good kisser. It was stupid to risk it, though. Not here, out in the open, on a mountainside where anyone might see. He had risked things so many times with Philip, when homosexuality had still been illegal in Britain. He had been younger then, more incautious at times even though he had been less sure of himself and the autonomy of his person. If this thing with Napoleon went further – if he could let it go further – he would be more careful this time round. Legalisation was so new, and having the law on his side didn’t mean that people would stand for a man kissing a man out here in front of the outraged eyes of the public.

‘You’re good with messed up things,’ he said. His face was still close enough to Napoleon’s that he could see every pore in his skin, see the brown flames of his irides, see each individual black eyelash. He could see his perfect lips.

Napoleon smiled, and now Illya was treated to those perfect lips moving and revealing a flash of perfect white teeth, American teeth that had probably had unnecessary dental work performed on them for all of his life. He thought about how those teeth felt to his tongue. Napoleon was such a good kisser.

‘I don’t know that I’m good with messed up things,’ Napoleon said, ‘but I’m good with what I care about. I try to be good with you, but you make me want to be very wicked.’

Illya didn’t know what to say. He just lay on the rock and felt it hard against his back every time he pulled air into his lungs. He thought about how close Napoleon was to him and about Philip and how he had thought that Philip would be forever, but that he had melted away like snow. Running away up a mountain didn’t do anything for that. He wasn’t going to find Philip on the summit of a Welsh mountain, and even if he did, there was nowhere further to go. He would stand there and Philip would stand there, and then they each would turn away and descend on different sides of the hill. There was nowhere to go with Philip, nothing to do. But Napoleon was here. Napoleon was here and real and warm, and he seemed so real. As real as Philip had seemed...

‘You should be careful sighing like that. You might set off an avalanche,’ Napoleon said with great gravity.

Illya shrugged, shoulders moving against the stone. ‘I don’t think these boulders have moved in millennia.’

‘Perhaps all they’re waiting for is one brooding Russian,’ Napoleon suggested, and now there was a sparkle in his eyes.

Illya sat up straight and looked down on the world below. It was so empty and so free, but even here there were other people, cars moving along the road like shelled insects, the bright spots of walkers in their vibrant clothes on the slopes. It had been foolish to let Napoleon kiss him here. He imagined someone coming across them. He imagined outraged calls of  _ poof, shirt-lifter, queer  _ called after them as they scurried away in shame. What was the law against decent people’s outrage?

‘Let’s go back to the hotel,’ he said abruptly. ‘I could eat two horses and a blue whale. What is it about swimming that makes you hungry?’

  


((O))

  


‘If I’d wanted to go on vacation with a maudlin lump I would have asked Frank from Records,’ Napoleon said rather tersely.

He could put up with a lot from Illya, and often did. Sometimes being with Illya was like being with a cat. He might sulk and prowl around suspiciously and ignore you sometimes, but it was worth it for the times that he was warm and happy and open, and he was certainly good to look at and better to touch. But still, it was frustrating at times, and especially at times like this. They had a limited amount of days to have their leisure before returning to work, and this was a long way to come for the privilege of watching the back of Illya’s head and the flat, sunburnt back of his neck and the hunch of his shoulders as he sat perched on a chair looking out of the window at the waves.

‘If you want to get back in the sea so badly, why don’t you?’ Napoleon asked.

Illya responded with a snort. ‘I have no desire to be turned into a block of ice.’

So Napoleon sighed and picked up a bottle of lotion from the night stand and said, ‘Why don’t you let me rub some cream into that burn, Illya? It’s going to be sore tomorrow.’

Illya grunted and unfolded himself from the chair.

‘It’s sore now,’ he said, but all the same, he started to strip off his polo shirt, wincing as he did so as if he were drawing sandpaper over his skin. He tossed the shirt onto the bed. Napoleon laid out a beach towel over the covers and gestured at it.

‘Lie down there,’ he said. ‘Lie down and relax. And try to stop brooding, won’t you? Dwelling on things never got anyone anywhere.’

Illya looked at him rather incredulously. ‘Napoleon, most of the great developments of human history have come from someone dwelling on something.’

‘Trust you,’ Napoleon murmured. ‘I’m not talking about Newton dwelling on the apple, Illya, or Einstein on the speed of light. I’m talking about  _ you _ dwelling on something from your past that you have no power to change – and something you won’t even  _ talk  _ to me about. Now lie down on that towel and stop brooding and let me soothe those burns.’

So Illya lay down and Napoleon dolloped some cream onto his hands, and stood there for a moment wondering how to approach this. Then he decided, and climbed onto the bed, straddling his friend and making himself comfortable on the pillow of his behind. Illya grunted as his weight descended, and Napoleon smiled. It was curiously satisfying to dominate Illya like this.

He touched his cream-laden fingers lightly to Illya’s shoulder, and Illya hissed at the cold on his hot skin. Napoleon could feel the heat radiating from him even without touching him.

‘No more sunbathing for you,’ he murmured. ‘My fair skinned Russian ice prince.’

Illya was silent, and Napoleon started to smooth the cream lightly over his skin in small circles, gratified at Illya’s sigh of relief.

‘Good, huh?’ he asked, and Illya grunted. ‘I’ll take that as,  _ yes, Napoleon, that’s very good, please carry on _ ,’ Napoleon said, squeezing some more cream onto his hand.

He slicked it gently over the heat of Illya’s neck and then down over his other shoulder, following the reddest areas of the burn. Sitting there astride Illya’s body was like looking down onto a landscape from a great height. The dip of his spine was a valley. His shoulder blades were low, angled hills. He moved his hands in slow, gentle circles, feeling the muscles beneath him become more and more relaxed as he worked with the cooling cream. The scent of coconut rose into the air, lifted by the heat of the skin it was soothing.

‘There,’ he said quietly, ‘and there. Is that good? Does it help?’

‘Yes, it helps,’ Illya said eventually, quietly. ‘Thank you, Napoleon.’

Napoleon sat there with his hands lightly on Illya’s shoulder blades, either side of his spine. Illya felt so warm and solid under his palms. It was hard to imagine that very real, solid human form caging around so much existential distress.

‘What was he called?’ he asked softly.

Illya was in a position of utter surrender. His head was on its side, his eyes were half closed. His arms were folded up above his head on the smooth sheet, his hands loosely clasped. The only things that moved were his lips.

‘Philip,’ he said. ‘He was called Philip.’

‘Oh,’ Napoleon said.

He had imagined perhaps a Russian man, or – he didn’t know what he had imagined. Illya had been so close he hadn’t known what time scale he was dealing with.

‘English?’ he asked, and Illya said, ‘Yes.’

Napoleon slipped quietly off Illya’s body then, and he missed the solid feeling of him between his thighs. He nudged at Illya’s side, and Illya moved reluctantly, lethargically, until he was right on the other edge of the narrow bed.

Napoleon lay down beside him, pressed close to him, his clothed torso against Illya’s bare skin.

‘He didn’t deserve you,’ he said, because of course that man didn’t deserve Illya. If anyone truly deserved Illya how could they hurt him?

‘You don’t know that,’ Illya murmured, but he rolled a little more onto his side, let Napoleon come close and slip his arms around Illya’s hot, coconut scented body, and hold him. His heart beat slowly inside its solid cage of flesh and muscle and bone. Napoleon spread his hand on Illya’s back and felt that steady beat.

‘ _ I _ deserve you,’ Napoleon said with absolute confidence. ‘That’s why I’m here. If I didn’t deserve you, you wouldn’t let me be here like this.’

Illya snorted then, and said, ‘Napoleon, do you know how many men I have fucked? Men who didn’t deserve an inch of me, but got – ’ He laughed harshly. ‘Well, the full six inches, at least.’

There was a quick curling of shock in Napoleon’s stomach, a little coldness. But he pushed it away. He pushed it down. He knew that Illya was pulling a hard carapace over himself, protecting himself.

‘Illya, you are not nearly as callous and worldly as you would like me to believe,’ Napoleon said softly. ‘How many of those men have you let hold you in bed? How many have you woken up next to in the morning?’ He leant closer and very softly touched his lips to Illya’s. ‘How many of those men have you let kiss you?’

Illya’s eyes were veils of blue. He didn’t seem to be seeing anything. Then he said simply, ‘None. None, Napoleon. At least, none of  _ them _ .’

And there Napoleon understood the distinction. There was him, and there was this Philip, and between was a void.

‘But Philip,’ Napoleon pressed, and Illya shook his head impatiently.

‘No, Napoleon. I don’t want to talk about him. Really.’

‘You just want to think about him, all the time,’ Napoleon said rather petulantly. But a horrible thought suddenly struck him, and he asked cautiously, ‘Illya, he isn’t dead, is he? I haven’t been – ’

Illya stiffened, his eyes flickered, and then he relaxed slowly, and he said, ‘No, he isn’t dead. At least, not as far as I know.’

‘Then he’s an idiot. An imbecile,’ Napoleon said, tightening his arms around Illya’s warm body. He felt so perfect in his arms. So vital, so alive, a perfect outer form holding an incredible mind. Yes, this Philip must be an imbecile.

Napoleon closed his eyes and thought about Illya’s harsh words.  _ The full six inches. _ He thought about when he had done the same, how he had fucked out his frustration and his fear and his loneliness at times. That wasn’t making love. He had rarely made love to a man. It just didn’t happen. It was easier to go with women, easier to be tender with them, easier to be soft and gentle. But then sometimes he needed something else. Sometimes he needed the roughness, the hardness, the feeling of muscles under his hands instead of soft flesh. He thought of those dark, desperate times in Korea, nights of drinking and laughing because it could be that tomorrow he would be blown to pieces. He had seen a man blown to pieces, seen the strange little curved potsherds of his skull, rusty with blood, dirty with hair. They were lying on the grass, in the mud, as if a balloon had burst. He had seen his entrails scattered across the dirt, found a hand hanging high up in a tree. That was how life could end. That was how sharp and sudden and ridiculous death could be.

So yes, he had taken comfort where he could. He remembered the sharp taste of Walt’s mouth, the way he had always smelled of mechanic’s grease, the feeling of his muscles as they tightened under tanned skin. He had always been hot and so full of energy, always ready to take and give comfort when it was needed. And Napoleon had started to fall in love. That was the strangest thing. He had never really experienced a feeling like that, not like love. He had felt the churning in the pit of his stomach and the shivers down the backs of his arms and his spine before, but nothing like that wrenching feeling that he started to get when Walt grinned at him and jumped up into the helicopter and flew off with a bright salute. He was glad he hadn’t seen him die, hadn’t seen him hanging from the exotic trees like that poor bastard whose name he couldn’t even remember. He hadn’t even seen Walt’s body, and that was good.

‘Now who’s brooding?’

Illya’s voice was quiet and golden, and he blinked his eyes open and looked into blue. Illya’s thumb stroked his cheek, and he said, ‘Thank you for rubbing the lotion in, Napoleon. Thank you for putting sun cream on my back at the beach, even if it was too late. Thank you for not walking out on me for being such an enormous idiot.’

‘I’m used to enormous idiots,’ Napoleon said with a smile. ‘I’m used to trouble makers. I don’t like walking out on things half way through.’

‘Well,’ Illya said slowly. He looked very sleepy. It was late, and the sky was inky through the crack in the curtains. ‘You choose what we should do tomorrow, Napoleon. You choose what to do, choose where to have lunch and dinner. Choose it all.’

  


((O))

  


It was strange how the sea could seem translucent like stained glass, but so solid, so very solid. The surface could be like a layer of silk undulating in the wind, but it was dark all the way down. Strange how that warmer foot of water at the surface hid such an alien world.

In Lyme Regis Illya had floated in the briny water and tried to see the rocks that his feet could feel on the bottom, and he could see nothing. He had brought up smaller stones with his toes and feet curled around them and examined them for fossils, and then thrown them aside. He had gone out further and trod water and held his palm flat and level as a shade across his forehead, trying to make out Philip in the scattering of holidaymakers there on the beach above the high tide line. Behind him the cliffs were slabs of black shale, heavy with the weight of millennia though the stone was still barely stone, half mud still, dark and soft under the fingers. The beach rang with the sound of fossil hammers, wielded by people who did not know what they were looking for.

‘You’re like a fish, Illya,’ Philip said when they were lying on the sand. ‘You spend so much time in the sea, you taste of salt at night.’

In Ukraina, Illya had spent his summers swimming in the Dnipro, crashing into the cool water with his friends, their screaming rising around him. He had dipped under the water and come up to gasp at the cornflower blue sky. He had tasted of river mud and silt, and his mother had called him her little fish as she sluiced him in the bath at night.

‘You don’t like the taste?’ Illya asked Philip.

‘I _love_ the taste. I always love the way you taste.’

Philip had always been so tender, always been so sweet. He had lifted Illya’s hand and pressed it to his lips, and he had licked his finger, right to the tip.

‘All of you. It tastes like that,’ he had said. ‘Every inch of you.’

‘So why are you complaining that I spend time in the sea?’

And Philip had lolled back on the beach towel and put his arms behind his head and grinned.

‘Because when you’re in the sea I can only see your head. I like you best when you’re just coming out of the waves, like Botticelli’s Venus rising from her shell. When you’re wet and dripping, and then the waves froth around your ankles, and then you start to pick up sand on your feet and calves. The sun shines on you and your trunks are like black coal and there’s absolutely nothing left to the imagination.’

‘Then you _do_ like me to swim,’ Illya had said.

‘I like you to get out again,’ Philip contradicted.

And Illya had pushed up off his own towel and run back down to the sea. There he had swum until his lungs burned, and he had trod water and watched the bodies on the shore, looking for his abandoned green towel like a flag, and Philip next to it, in his trunks and nothing else, still with his glasses perched on his nose, and staring at the sky. He let the waves carry him in a little closer to shore. He knocked his ankles on rocks that rose up, and felt for stones with his feet and lifted them, and sometimes saw tiny ammonites curled as if in sleep. He threw the stones and watched them arc and then splash into the water, and disappear into the blind depths.

Later he had found bruises like little blossoms on his ankles and Philip had kissed them and then licked the salt from them, and then come over him and kissed him into total submission and then made love to him so tenderly in the hotel bed.

‘Do you expect to find the secrets to life in that water?’ Napoleon asked him, nudging him on the arm. The sea was like silk, dark blue and purple and shimmering under the lowering light, and it stretched until it met the flat, wide horizon in a darker line.

Illya pulled his eyes away from the sea and smiled, shaking his head. He was trying to enjoy himself, trying to think only of this holiday, now, and Napoleon with him, but his thoughts kept drifting. There were so many things that caught at his memory and tugged it along. He tried to remember the happier things but even they took that little seed of pain and made it push out roots and leaves and grow a little inside him. It was so hard to think of the good memories with Philip and be happy because each one made him miss Philip more. He knew how much Philip would have loved this place, this tatty seaside town along the coast with its long beach and its tawdry funfair.

‘I don’t expect to find anything in that water,’ Illya said. ‘Jellyfish and fish and seaweed and some algae, I suppose. Maybe seals. But not the secrets to life. I’m a physicist, not a biologist.’

‘Ah, then you look for the secrets to life in the stars,’ Napoleon said with a sage nod. ‘Quite out of reach and far away, and always theoretical.’

‘Not always theoretical,’ Illya quibbled. ‘And I’m not an astronomer.’

‘No. You’re a brat,’ Napoleon said with a grin, and ruffled Illya’s hair.

‘ _ Brat _ is Ukrainian for brother,’ Illya said, looking directly at him.

‘My feelings for you are more than brotherly,’ Napoleon said in a low, secret voice. ‘Now, here we are. Come on.’

And they turned through an arch lit brashly with coloured bulbs, and into the fairground. A rollercoaster rose twisting into the air, its tracks dark silhouettes against the sky. Its cars plummeted, deceptively well controlled, and the passengers screamed.

‘It’s not Coney Island but it’s as good as I’ve got,’ Napoleon said, and Illya said, ‘Not everywhere can be Coney Island. It will be fine.’

The music was as garish as the lights, clamouring out from the rides, clashing and jumbling and drifting through the growing night. There were teenagers in jeans, girls in short skirts, couples hand in hand, kids with their parents. The smell of cooking fat was in the air, and the sweet bitter smell of burnt sugar. Lights flashed on every ride as if they were birds of paradise competing for a mate.

Illya felt a tug on his fingers and looked down in surprise. Napoleon had caught his hand and pulled him onward, and Illya quickly extracted his fingers and made an effort to keep up as Napoleon went straight for a round stall with bobbing ducks on a moat of water around prizes in the centre.

‘I’d try the shooting range but it seems unfair,’ he said.

‘The guns are usually off,’ Illya remarked, and Napoleon grinned.

‘Well, in that case, it’s a challenge.’

Illya reached out and picked up a cane fishing rod with a string and hook attached.

‘This time it is my turn to hook a prize, my friend,’ he said, and he handed sixpence to the stall owner and the man pushed it into the pockets of his grubby apron and reeled off his spiel about what mark won which prize. Illya eyed the ducks keenly, but there was no way to tell which would yield a greater prize. He hooked a particularly garish one with a splayed orange bill, and transported it, dripping, to the attendant.

‘Anything from the bottom row,’ he said with disinterest, dropping the duck back into the water, mechanically leaning the rod back with its fellows.

‘What do you think, Napoleon?’ Illya asked, gesturing at the knick-knacks. ‘What would you like? A china figurine? A little doll?’

‘There,’ Napoleon said, nodding his head, his eyes directed straight at a little china model of a spaniel that sat on its own and stared mournfully at the rows of toys. He raised his voice. ‘That one, my good man. Thank you.’

So the attendant picked up the spaniel and regarded it with an expression of disgust, and Napoleon took it with a smile and kissed it flamboyantly, and slipped it into his pocket.

‘If you leave it with the koala, they might breed,’ Illya said.

‘Would you like cotton candy, Illya?’ Napoleon asked. ‘Or maybe we should leave that to later. How about the rollercoaster? How about the bumper cars?’

‘I want to see how well we do on the shooting range,’ Illya said. ‘Every stall is out to trick you somehow. Let’s see what we can earn back.’

So they wandered among the stalls and the music blazed in their ears and the cries and laughs of the crowds surrounded them. They found the shooting range and Napoleon tried first, and then Illya, and it was a great pleasure to see the dismay on the attendant’s face and his carefully faked smile as he had to hand over the prize of an ugly, knobbly vase with a ten shilling note taped around it.

‘There, profit,’ Napoleon said in satisfaction, peeling the note from the vase and then examining the grotesque thing. ‘You know, I could use this for the marigolds,’ he said in a mischievous tone, and Illya caught him glancing sideways at his friend, an expectant look on his face.

‘I expect you could upgrade to nasturtiums,’ Illya commented blandly.

Napoleon left the vase on the counter and just took the ten shilling note.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I want to go on the rollercoaster.’

‘I want to go on the Ferris wheel,’ Illya countered.

They stood still on the warm, dusty ground and looked at each other. Illya moved his feet a little further apart and just waited. Napoleon rustled the note in his fingers and then folded it and slipped it into his wallet.

‘So, we’re going on the Ferris wheel,’ he said, and Illya relaxed. ‘ _ After _ we go on the rollercoaster.’

The rollercoaster swooped up into the air and plunged down to the ground, and Illya held on with white knuckles like everyone else, but neither he nor Napoleon screamed. He had done far more dangerous things than this. They got off when the cars finally rolled to a halt and wandered over to the Ferris wheel. Illya handed over some coins and they clambered into a swaying gondola. The attendant pulled the bar down over their knees and the gondola rocked as the wheel moved round for the next passengers. As they reached the top they saw the sun low in the sky, glittering on the undulating sea, the coast running away to the soft rising mountains of Snowdonia which were gold in the lowering light. Illya sighed, ‘Look at that view,’ and Napoleon said, ‘Kiss me, Illya.’

Illya stared at him, at his lips, at the darkness of his eyes and the richness of his hair. He so badly wanted to kiss him.

‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Really, Napoleon. People can see from the ground, you know. Look how overlooked we are.’

Really they were overlooking everything else. Down below he could see a portly man with his hair combed over a shining bald spot, a little girl in a pink dress holding each hand. Then he saw a teenage boy with his arms around a girl and his mouth fastened to hers like a limpet on a rock. Another boy with his arm around another girl, his hand tracking slyly down towards her rounded buttocks. A girl laughing at what a boy said to her, and twisting her fingers in her hair. A husband kissing his wife as their child tried to push between them. It was so easy for all the normal couples down there.

‘We can do  _ this _ ,’ Napoleon said, and he slipped his hand over Illya’s where it lay between them on the cramped seat. Hidden by the bulk of their thighs Napoleon’s fingers entwined with his, and Illya smiled.

‘Thinking of him?’ Napoleon asked, looking sideways at Illya as the gondola jerked again and the wheel started moving, slipping, tumbling down.

‘I wasn’t,’ Illya said, but then of course he thought of Philip, he thought of that fair in Cambridge, he thought about rising so high on the Ferris wheel that they could see all the flat land around. He remembered how he had held Philip’s hand just as he was holding Napoleon’s now and how they had kissed at the top of the circle because it had been so dark up there and the gondola was high backed, and because they were young and didn’t think or care about who might see.

‘I didn’t mean to make you think about him,’ Napoleon said, squeezing his hand, and Illya smiled.

‘I know,’ he said.

He looked out over the sea as they swept to the top of the wheel again and his stomach dropped as they plunged down and the ground slipped beneath them and they were turning up again, the painted, rusty metal struts weaving across his vision, the lights flashing in red and orange and blue. This was now. This was here. The air, the lights, the sea, the sounds, all seemed hyper-real. Napoleon’s body next to him seemed hyper-real. Inside Napoleon’s chest his heart was beating, over and over. Oxygen was filling his lungs, sinking into alveoli, reddening his blood. Electricity was sparking from synapse to synapse in his brain. They were so alive, he felt so real. He wanted to seize that moment and kiss Napoleon with all his being.

He stared, and realised that they were stationary again, stopped at the front of the wheel, just hanging there while the music blared and people were let out of the lower gondolas. Napoleon squeezed his fingers and let go and decorously laid his hand back on his lap.

‘What now?’ Napoleon asked as they finally reached the bottom. The attendant released the safety bar and Napoleon gave him a salute before pushing to his feet. Illya got up and stretched. Getting out of the rocking gondola was like getting out of a boat onto land.

‘Bumper cars?’ Napoleon asked.

So Illya followed him over to the wide rink of electric cars and they paid for one each and joined the racing throng of screaming teenagers accelerating around the arena with sparks flying from the electric grille above the cars. By the time they were finished there Illya was breathless with laughter from seeing Napoleon’s aggrieved expression every time he slammed his car into Napoleon’s.

‘Candy floss,’ he said as they stumbled from the ride, pointing at the stall. ‘And something to drink.’

‘Root beer?’ Napoleon asked, and Illya laughed because Napoleon was so conspicuously American. He touched his arm to steer him over to the food stand, where he asked for two sticks of candy floss and two bottles of ginger beer.

They left the fair and just walked, wandering along the roads that followed the line of the shore, then stepping down onto the broad sands and walking, just walking, going nowhere. The candy floss was sickly and sharp in the back of Illya’s throat, his fingers were sticky, he thought his face must be sticky. They walked to a meandering channel of water that was making its way through the sand to the sea, and Napoleon dipped his handkerchief into the coolness and wiped spun sugar from Illya’s cheek. While Illya swirled his fingers in the water, Napoleon attended to his own sticky skin.

The sound of the funfair grew distant, the shrieks from the rollercoaster blending with the shrieks of seagulls as they glided to their evening rest. The sun was sinking behind the ridges of the mountains, pressing the world in gold. They were utterly alone on the edge of the sea, where little waves seeped in and retreated like a pulse of blood. Napoleon positioned Illya carefully so that his body was sheltered from sight of the shore by Napoleon’s form, and in the dying light he put a hand to the back of Illya’s head and tilted his lips down and kissed him so softly it was like the brush of a rose.

  


((O))

  


The dreams came thick and fast, relentless. Every time he fell asleep there was another dream moving in his mind. He was at that fair in Cambridge, shooting at battered targets, hearing the metal ping and seeing them fall each time he hit. And Philip was there, very close to him, so close he could feel his breath, his arm around Illya’s back in a way it never had been in reality. And then he turned and Philip wasn’t there, he was lost in the crowd, there were children milling and laughing and parents shepherding them and the calls of the stall owners and the chug of engines, the stink of diesel, the clash of music, and Philip was nowhere, nowhere to be seen.

He turned and looked for him. He ran through the crowds with that puny rifle, searching for Philip, and then a cold sense of dread fell on him because he would be arrested for stealing the rifle, he would be arrested for carrying it in that crowd, he would be arrested for loving Philip. He couldn’t drop the rifle. He tried to call Philip’s name but his voice wouldn’t work. His voice came out as a strengthless caw. He spun and searched and there were all those English people everywhere, and no Philip, no Philip at all –

And he woke, panting, hot, the covers tangled over him, sweat on his back and his chest, sweat between his legs. He lay there staring into the almost-dark of the room and tried to rationalise all of those thoughts. He reminded himself that the fair tonight had been nothing like that. There had been no mountains in Cambridge, only endless fields around the city, flatness and marsh and meandering rivers. There had been no sea, no beach. No Napoleon.

And he looked sideways for that reassurance. There he was. Napoleon, sleeping, lying on his back like a model of how to sleep, his mouth a little open, the slight light catching his profile, edging his lips and his nose. Napoleon, his dark hair tousled and his eyes closed and every other bit of him tucked under the covers.

Illya got up and opened the window, just a crack, and felt the cool air huff in. It touched the sweat-soaked cloth of his pyjamas, and he shivered. He stripped off pyjama bottoms and jacket and tossed them on the floor, and stood there naked in the dropping cool air that flowed through the window like water. He let it pass over his heat, his wetness, and gradually dry him off. And then he got back into bed, shivering a little now, and pulled the covers up to his chin. He lay there looking at the ghost of the ceiling in the darkness.

He picked up his watch and studied the luminescent hands, and saw it was almost four in the morning. This was the third time he’d woken up. Three times, all from dreams of Philip.

He thought about standing on the beach in the gathering darkness, the waves a soft shush on the shore. Napoleon’s hand on his head, fingers in his hair. Napoleon’s lips against his, Napoleon’s tongue coming into his mouth so softly. He had accepted that kiss in that beautiful moment. He had tasted Napoleon’s mouth and made a little sigh at how good it was. And then Napoleon had drawn away, had dropped his hand, had said, ‘It’s getting late. I guess we should get back to the car and drive home. Lots to do tomorrow.’

There was such a gulf between his narrow bed and Napoleon’s on the other side of the night stand. It was like lying on one headland looking over to another, with such a wide space of sea between. It was ridiculous to be so separate from people in life, ridiculous to live apart. There was nothing wrong about this love. Surely there was nothing wrong? How could love ever be wrong?

He despised himself for his unnaturalness, more because it created such pain than anything else. If it hadn’t been unnatural he would still be with Philip now. Philip wouldn’t be playing Happy Families with that woman, that Marian. But – He looked across at Napoleon, neat in his bed like a saint on a tomb. If it hadn’t been for that woman then he wouldn’t be here with Napoleon now. Perhaps – perhaps it was all right. Perhaps he could bear the loss of Philip if it allowed him to have Napoleon.

It was all a river, he thought. All of life was a river pulling one through the land. The currents twisted and pushed things together and tore things apart, and when the great body of water ran out to the sea some went to the left and some to the right and some flowed in the deep centre channels, and two leaves from the same branch fallen into the water might never meet again.

  


((O))

  


When he returned to Cambridge it felt so strange. The whole place had become another world, like stepping through the mirror glass. He stumbled from the train, exhausted and bewildered. When he walked through the streets it felt as if he were in another country. He felt numb. Numbly he stared at the beautiful Great Gate of Trinity College and the glimpse of the Great Court beyond. Numbly he turned into Angel Court and pushed open the door and stumbled up the stairs until he reached his own little room with the sloping ceiling. It was all the same. How could it all be the same? The narrow little bed and the white sheets and the brown blankets. The shelves of books and the paper pinned to the cork board and the desk with his typewriter and the piles of notes. The little gas fire and the tall window. It was all the same, but as if he had stepped through a mirror. He dropped himself down onto that narrow bed and pushed his face into the pillow.

The cleaning lady came in without knocking, and said in a surprised tone, ‘Oh, Mr Kuryakin, I thought you were still on holiday, dear. I just came in to dust. Do you mind?’

So Illya turned onto his side and muttered, ‘Came back early. Ideas I want to work on. I got the milk train.’

‘Oh, you poor boy, you must be exhausted,’ she said. ‘I’ll do the dusting then I’ll bring you a nice cup of tea. How about that? Don’t worry, I won’t touch your notes. What about Mr Glanville? Did he come too or did you leave him to it?’

‘I left him to it,’ Illya said.  _ Left him. Left him behind.  _ How his body ached, how his knee hurt. But he felt conversation would be required, so he said, ‘He’s moving out soon, anyway, Mrs M. He’s completed his thesis.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ she said, pulling her cloth swiftly over the bookshelves. ‘We all like Mr Glanville. Well, I’ll bring you that tea,’ she said, giving a cursory polish to the washbasin in its built in cupboard. ‘Just a minute, Mr Kuryakin.’

When she did come back she brought a plate of buttered toast too, and Illya took his jar of strawberry jam out of the cupboard and dropped a spoonful into the steaming cup and stirred it in.

‘Oh, you do take your tea funny, Mr Kuryakin,’ the cleaner told him, and then she left him alone, and he spread jam on his toast and drank his sweet tea, and tried to think about his thesis, but the toast tasted like cardboard and the thought of Philip inserted itself at every turn.

And of course Philip roared back in the hired car, and he was at the door by mid afternoon, tapping his fingers on the wood, calling, ‘Illya? Eel? Illya, open the door.’ And then banging his knuckles on it, his voice stronger, deeper. ‘Illya, let me in. Illya, please.’ And then, ‘Illya Nikolayevich Kuryakin, open this door or I’ll create such a scandal the whole college will hear of it.’

And Illya’s chest tightened, because to Philip a scandal meant people talking for a few weeks and perhaps some discreet donations to the college to smooth things over, but to Illya it meant men coming in the night and dragging him away, it meant being forcibly committed to an institution or being packed into a cattle wagon with sixty other men and taken to the far cold reaches of his country and worked into his grave, or just being shot, just like that, in a dark, obscure place. He was just old enough to remember the Purges. Philip had no idea. He had no idea at all.

So he opened the door and let Philip in and he sat back down at his desk and stared at his notes without seeing them. He stared at his hands on the wood, at his fingernails. Philip had stroked those fingers, sucked them into his mouth, kissed his fingertips. Illya had done such things with those hands.

Philip’s feet made the floorboards creak. He sat down on the bed where they had made love so many times, and then he got up again. He paced, and Illya waited. And then Philip cajoled and spoke softly and put his hands on Illya’s shoulders and rubbed. He got down on his knees and pleaded and promised it would be all right, that they could manage, he and Marian in their marital home and Illya somewhere nearby, Illya the clandestine lover, the dirty secret that no one would ever discover.

‘I love you,’ Philip pleaded, and that was the hardest thing. Philip’s love was undeniable. It was real. It was so beautiful and he needed it so much.

And Illya had clenched his fists on the desk and said, ‘Please, Philip. Go. I only have a few more months. Please don’t destroy my doctorate as well as everything else. Please show me that single drop of mercy.’

‘Kiss me, Illya,’ Philip said. ‘Kiss me, please. Let me show you...’

He wanted so badly to kiss him. He wanted to. God, Philip’s lips, Philip’s mouth, the sweet, pure joy of Philip’s body. It would be so easy to give in. He wanted to turn around and hold him and make him promise that everything would be all right.

‘Will you leave her and stay with me?’ he asked.

He shouldn’t have spoken. He hated the desperation in his voice.

‘I  _ can’t _ , Eel,’ Philip said. ‘Please, Illya. Please. I don’t love her. I can’t love her. But I don’t have a choice.’

_ A choice _ ... There were always choices. Always. Didn’t Philip know how many choices there were in this country? Didn’t he know how lucky he was?

Then the anger crackled in him. His voice was like a wind blown in from the Steppes.

‘But you can marry her? How many times have you kissed her?’ He couldn’t say her name. ‘Does she know how badly you lie with your lips?’

He was going to lose his English. He was too upset. He wanted to tell Philip everything he felt in Ukrainian, in his mother’s tongue. He wished he could just sweep aside everything on his desk and leave, board a plane, make the long flight to Moskva and then to Kyiv and weep in his mother’s arms. He was so far away from everything he called home.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Go. Leave me alone. Please, Philip, if you love me at all, leave me alone.’

And then Philip left. Illya sat there staring at the typewriter, at his hands, at the wood grain of the desk. His head ached fiercely. He remembered abstractedly that he had a meeting with his supervisor next Monday, that he had books he must return to the library soon, that he needed to make sure his gown was pressed and clean. So many things revolving in his mind, tumbling and falling, and all overwhelmed by that one awful thing, that terrible fact that he had lost Philip, and he couldn’t speak about it to a single soul.

Illya opened the cheap record player he had bought with his carefully saved money and pulled out the stack of jazz records from under his bed, and put a gleaming black disc onto the turntable. He dropped the needle into the crackling groove, then turned it up just loud enough to cover other sounds, and he wept.

  


((O))

  


Illya unfolded himself from the bed, pushing away the blue satinate cover and touching his bare feet onto the thick carpet. He sat there like that for a moment, feeling the softness on the soles of his feet. The tight aching in his head and eyes told him that he had slept badly. He knew he had slept badly. He had woken so often. He moved his toes in the pile of the carpet and remembered standing on the sand, remembered Napoleon kissing him. He remembered shreds of troubling dreams and that feeling of guilt that conformed to him like another skin.

He stretched his spine backwards, forwards, yawned, and padded over to the window before he even looked to see if Napoleon were awake. He slipped one curtain aside to see the sky was a little more cloudy than it had been, but the waves were still curling in over the sand and shingle, the seagulls were still wheeling in the sky. There was a boat on the horizon, and already a few people were on the beach. There were dogs there that ran about with crazed enthusiasm, chasing balls or valiantly taking on the waves.

He rested his forehead for a moment on the cool of the glass and then turned back into the room. He had expected to see Napoleon curled under his covers, but he wasn’t. He was sitting up in bed, hair tousled, holding a small, red-covered guidebook in his hands.

‘Oh,’ Illya said in surprise. ‘Good morning.’

Napoleon’s smile was angelic. ‘Good morning, Illya. I wanted to take you to see some castles today, so I was just reading up on them.’ He was flicking through the guidebook and idly looking at the pictures. ‘Did you know they were built – ’

‘Near the end of the thirteenth and start of the fourteenth century by Edward the First, when he was trying to subdue the Welsh princes,’ Illya said prosaically, coming back to sit on the edge of his bed. ‘Conway Castle was completed in 1289. Building didn’t cease on Caernarvon Castle until sometime around 1330, and it is one of the most impressive of the north Welsh castles. Its architectural style is borrowed from Roman constructions in Constantinople. Then there’s Beaumaris on Anglesey, which was never finished, but it’s a rather beautiful design.’

Napoleon snapped the guide book shut, looking rather chagrined. He got out of bed and started to sort through the clothes he had left draped over the back of a chair.

‘Well, so we’ve toured them. Where would you like to go next? There are some lovely neolithic monuments – or do you want to tell me about those too?’

He was pulling on his trousers rather jerkily, but he looked up in time to catch Illya’s rueful smile.

‘I’m sorry, Napoleon. I do want to see them, those ones in particular,’ Illya said. ‘That’s why I read up about them. Shall we dress and go down for breakfast? I’m starving.’

‘Hmm,’ Napoleon said. He picked up his shirt and slipped his arms into the sleeves, then started to button it up the front with nimble fingers. ‘Can you tell me the origins of the full English breakfast, too?’

There were so many guilts in the world, some of them large and some of them very small. Illya felt as if he had a monopoly on them all. But then something in Napoleon’s eyes softened.

‘First, this,’ Napoleon said, and he knelt down by Illya’s bed.

Illya remembered how Philip had knelt in his room, knelt as if he were praying, as if he were about to offer a proposal. He had knelt there to beg.

‘No, don’t kneel. Don’t kneel,’ Illya said.

He got to his feet and lifted Napoleon up with his fingers lightly caught in his own. He was desperate for Napoleon to not echo Philip in any way. He was tired of that particular ghost.

‘All right,’ Napoleon said. ‘All right. First, come here,’ he said.

He stroked his fingers across the back of Illya’s neck and gently pulled him a little closer, and he kissed him slowly and softly, tasting the depths of his mouth. His other hand was in the small of Illya’s back, broad and firm, as if he knew how little strength Illya’s knees had when Napoleon kissed him like that. If he fell backwards Napoleon would catch him.

‘Let me do that every morning,’ Napoleon said, looking directly into Illya’s eyes, fluffing his hair with the tips of his fingers. ‘It would be my privilege to kiss you every morning.’

Illya laughed. He didn’t know what to do but laugh because that was such a deep, serious thing that Napoleon had just said, and how could he possibly face that with gravity?

‘Are you going to come over to my apartment every day before I get up? That might be awkward in New York traffic.’

‘Pedantic Russian,’ Napoleon chided him. He hadn’t minded the laugh. He understood its reasons. ‘Why don’t you come to my apartment?’

‘There is the same problem of traffic,’ Illya reminded him.

‘Not if you were there the night before,’ Napoleon said. His smile was tentative, hopeful, with an uncertainty that Illya wasn’t used to seeing. He felt a strange lightness inside, a kind of flipping over in his stomach.

‘If I were there the night before?’

‘And the night before that, and the night after, and the next night, and the next,’ Napoleon said.

Illya regarded him very seriously. He felt as if the floor were falling away under his feet. A feeling of vertigo swam in his head. The laugh turned into a kind of nervous giggle.

‘Napoleon, are you asking me to live with you?’

Then Napoleon grinned. ‘Rents are high in the big city, my friend, and I have a lot of space. There isn’t anything queer about two bachelors sharing an apartment, is there?’

Illya faltered. He didn’t know what to say. To pack up all of his things and move them over into Napoleon’s luxurious apartment seemed like such an enormous step. But wasn’t that what he had craved with Philip? Hadn’t he wanted the bliss of waking up every morning beside the man that he loved?

‘I – ’ he said.

He read the flicker of disappointment in Napoleon’s eyes. Napoleon was much more insecure than his extrovert personality made it seem.

‘I would like to try that,’ he said quickly. He couldn’t bear to see a moment of that disappointment. ‘Perhaps for a week, at first.’

Napoleon caught his hands. ‘Then two weeks, then three?’

‘Perhaps,’ Illya nodded. ‘Perhaps two weeks, perhaps three. Perhaps a month. You’re right. We would save a lot on rent.’

‘Ever the romantic,’ Napoleon said, and Illya smiled.

‘You know me well.’

Napoleon had no idea of the romantic thoughts that dwelt deep down inside him. He had no idea at all. He had no idea how scared Illya was at the thought of this, how he felt as if he were plummeting and plummeting towards an unknown fate, and only Napoleon’s hands kept him safe. He was a hermit crab stripped from its stolen shell and he didn’t know how to protect himself from Napoleon’s love.

‘Don’t drop me,’ Illya said suddenly.

Napoleon’s hands tightened on his. ‘Never,’ he promised.

‘No, I am serious,’ Illya said, and his voice was absolutely serious, his tone hollow and afraid. ‘Don’t drop me, Napoleon. Don’t turn around in a week or a month and tell me you’ve decided to hook up with Betty or Caroline or Nancy or any of those women you constantly dangle from your arm. I – I cannot do that. I cannot be hidden in your apartment while you act out a front with a rainbow of women. I will not be your unpleasant secret hidden in your closet.’

Napoleon’s eyes grew very serious, very dark and brown. ‘You know we can’t be open about it,’ he cautioned Illya. ‘It’s still not legal there like it is here.’

Illya tossed that away with a guttural sound.

‘I know. I know _that_. I don’t mean I want you to take me dancing and kiss me in Central Park. But no fronts, Napoleon. No women just to prove to everyone that you still have your machismo. No leading girls on and taking them home to your parents and – Oh god – ’

He almost choked. There was nothing to choke on but his own throat. The thought of that, of Napoleon holding a girl on his arm, introducing her to his father, laughing about how maybe this would be the one... No, he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t let that happen.

Napoleon’s hands squeezed on his. ‘No women,’ he said. ‘No girls. No pretence. I will come home to you and only you. I will go out with you and only you. That will be the beginning and the end. Yes?’

‘Yes,’ Illya said, then he said, ‘ _ Yes, _ ’ and his knees felt weak and he hardly knew how to continue standing up.

‘You need a good breakfast in you,’ Napoleon said very seriously, and Illya laughed, because Napoleon knew him so well.

  


((O))

  


Leaving Cambridge at last had been the strangest thing, the hardest thing. There was nothing triumphant, nothing ceremonial. The graduation ceremony wouldn’t be for months, so all he had was a flimsy piece of paper, a letter telling him he had been awarded the achievement of doctor of philosophy. So there he was, with another little group of letters to add after his name. Dr Kuryakin, BSc, MSc, PhD. Just a little piece of paper, and the whole future open to him like an empty wasteland.

He had so much more than the two suitcases he had brought in to the country. He had his record player and his stack of discs and more clothes than could fit into his cases. He had books, so many books. Not just books for his doctorate, but poetry books, plays, novels in English and French and Russian. He had his worn leather bound copy of Masefield’s poems that he would stuff in his pocket and take everywhere, signed, how precious, by Masefield himself and filled with Illya’s own little annotations and, God help him, with Philip’s too. It was filled with words in Philip’s tight, neat hand.

He had his bicycle. An entire bicycle to travel with, and nowhere to put it.

He had little knick-knacks and trinkets of the kind he had never expected to possess. He had that beautiful palm-fitting ammonite that he had pulled from the sand in Lyme Regis, that he hadn’t even seen until the next day, because he had birthed it from the shingle in darkness. But it had been perfect, dark, almost black, with all the formless stone worn away by the sea until only the mathematical swirl of the ammonite was left, a perfect Fibonacci spiral.

Was that all that was left? He had barely spoken to Philip in all the time since he had come home from Lyme. Philip had moved out, but he came back. He kept coming back. He tried to speak to him so many times, and Illya had coiled back into his shell and closed his eyes and tried so hard not to be broken apart. Philip was a sharp bird’s beak trying to pull him out into the open, and he felt so soft and raw, and he fought with all of his strength to stay protected. But it hadn’t worked, had it? He had been hurt so deeply. He had thought that he kept himself safe, but he hadn’t, because he wouldn’t still be hurting now. Ten years would have healed those wounds.

The walls of Edward’s castles were thick enough to protect you from anything, he thought. Six feet or more of rough rock fitted together and finished off to make a bastion to protect the English from the marauding Welsh. Walls that had stood for eight hundred years without falling. But still, they had been breached. Even all of that heavy stone couldn’t stop the most determined. Caernarvon had been breached by the furious Welsh while it was still being built. Beaumaris had never been completed. And now the castles were full of the Welsh, run by the Welsh, profited from by the Welsh. Who, really, had won?

Maybe there was nothing that could be done about wounds inflicted by the person that you loved. That was the trouble. You stripped off all of your armour, you let them in through your defences, you became as small and naked as a hermit crab pulled from its shell. And then when they stabbed you it went straight into the heart. And what could be done about that? You couldn’t live without love.

Illya opened his eyes and stared at the thick, dull walls and the brilliant blue sky and the fluffs of white cloud that drifted overhead. In between the outer wall and the inner castle it was like standing at the bottom of a great ravine. Somewhere up there the sun was hot, but here it was utterly shaded. The grass was a deeper green than the America of his experience could manage. It reminded him more of spring in Ukraina.

Conway Castle had been endearing. Caernarvon had been somehow sterile and harsh. But this one… Beaumaris spoke to him in a strange way. Perhaps it was its symmetry. Perhaps it was because it retained its moat. Perhaps it was because it had started out strong and proud, and then something had happened, and its defences had never been finished. But it was still here. It stood here, all around him, strong and firm, ruined but great. Children ran and shrieked in the shade of the outer ward. They wielded wooden swords and aimed ridiculously ineffective bows and pretended to be knights. Even the girls pretended to be knights because in the heat of the moment there was no fun in being a maiden. And their parents called out to them like anxious hens as their offspring ran towards jagged piles of stone.  _ Don’t climb up there. For God’s sake, Roger! O, Duw, mae’r plant ’di mynd yn wallgof! _

It was a rich medley of sounds, like listening to a running stream, and he just stood there and listened. How strange it would be to have children. He supposed he must give up all hope of ever having that. Napoleon had asked him to live with him. That very morning he had asked him to live with him. And so that meant there would never be children, there would never be a loving wife and a family home and little faces around the breakfast table.

He didn’t feel sad, because all he could see in that image was a woman that he didn’t, that he couldn’t, love; not because he couldn’t conceive of loving a woman but because he couldn’t conceive of not loving Napoleon. Perhaps he could form an affection for her, a very deep affection, as one felt affection for anyone deeply involved in one’s life. He thought of Oscar Wilde, his wife, his children. But how had that worked out?

He watched the children and felt that small river of pain turning to a trickle, and he turned to Napoleon, and smiled.

‘Shall we scale one of the towers? I want to see the view.’

Napoleon was carefree in a light blue polo shirt and cream slacks, his hair lightly brylcreemed to keep away the fingers of the wind, his camera hanging around his neck. He had taken so many photos, and he had arranged Illya to stand in more than half of them. He had told him to smile. In each location he had found a helpful stranger to take a photo of him together with his friend. When they got back those photos would be stuck into a book, Illya was sure. Napoleon had so many photo albums. He would be able to flick through the stiff pages and look back on this strange sliver of life when everything had changed.

Somewhere, in a shoebox, there was a slim cluster of black and white photographs from Cambridge, Lyme Regis, the Lake District, Aberystwyth, Whitby, and other holidays, tied together with old string. He had only had a little box Brownie, and he developed his photographs over the washbasin in his room, covering the window with old blackout material and covering the cracks in the door. Napoleon, of course, used colour film, and took it to a lab.

‘All right. Well, how do we get in?’ Napoleon asked, turning in a circle, craning his neck back so that his Adam’s apple stood out on his throat. Illya looked at the little flash of chest revealed by the open buttons of the polo shirt’s neck, and felt a ridiculous tenderness for this man that he had chosen.

‘Here,’ Napoleon said, his fingers catching ever so briefly at Illya’s. ‘It’s this way. We need to go back round to the gatehouse and get into the inner ward, and then – ’

‘We’ll find it,’ Illya said confidently.

After a few minutes of looking they stepped into the broad, sun-dazzled arena of the inner ward, and heat hit Illya’s skin. He stood there for a moment just looking. A girl was turning cartwheels on the grass, her cotton skirt flapping as she tumbled, her legs pink down to her calf-length white socks. More boys were playing at being soldiers, knights, invaders, shouting and screaming while their parents smiled or sighed. Illya pointed to a dark entrance and said, ‘That’s the closest tower. Let’s go in there.’

And a boy pushed past him, knocking him in his excitement, and from behind him a man shouted, ‘Elijah! For God’s sake, where are – ’

And then he stopped, and Illya turned, because he knew that voice so well.

He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to say. Napoleon asked him, ‘Illya?’ but his voice sounded far away, and he didn’t reply.

There he was. Tall, lanky, long armed and long legged. His flopping hair was being struck by the sun, but it showed some premature grey. His nose was still very straight and long. He wore round wire rimmed NHS glasses. His shirt sleeves were carelessly rolled up, just as they always had been. He had a pipe held cosily in his hand. He had on a checked shirt and dull dun slacks. Illya felt as if the dead had risen before him.

‘Illya?’ Napoleon asked again.

A woman came walking over, a conventional, well dressed woman, her hand holding the hand of a little girl.

‘Philip,’ she said. She was smiling but she looked tired. ‘Where’s Eli run off to? I’ve told him time and time again not to run off without us.’

‘He went up the tower,’ Philip said. He was staring at Illya, and Illya felt like an ant under a magnifying glass, small and helpless and caught in heat. ‘I’ll – go after him. You stay down here with Nicola, darling. It’s a long climb for little legs.’

And he ruffled the little girl’s hair and kissed his wife on the cheek, and then he looked at Illya with his grey eyes, and moved past him to the dark, yawning entrance to the tower.

Illya moved jerkily, like a marionette. He wasn’t quite sure how he was moving. He followed Philip’s tall form through that dark doorway, and then he said faintly, ‘Philip.’

Philip stopped then in the darkness. It was almost impossible to see after coming in from the sunlight. Illya turned his head back stiffly to the light outside. Napoleon was talking to Marian. That woman must be Marian, in her knee-length pale green skirt and her cream blouse. Napoleon was talking to her with his most charming air, smiling and gesturing at something on the other side of the ward, but he glanced briefly at the doorway, and in that moment he looked so worried.

‘Philip,’ Illya said again.

And Philip’s hands were on his arms then, pulling him away from the doorway into a little chamber, a dark little chamber with only one exit and an arrow slit making a single white line of light in the wall.

‘Oh my God, Eel,’ he said, and his fingers were in Illya’s hair, so soft and light. ‘God, your hair. You’ve let your hair get so long. It’s beautiful.’

‘Your children,’ Illya said, and his voice sounded frigid, ‘are called Elijah and Nicola?’

They were his names.  _ His  _ names. Illya was the Ukrainian form of Elijah.  _ My God is Yah. _ And Nicola. That was his patronymic. Nikolay. That was his father’s name.

‘Yes,’ Philip said. Illya couldn’t properly see his face, couldn’t see how his eyes looked. ‘Yes, they had to be.’

‘And does – she know?’

Philip’s hand kept roaming through his hair and Illya put his own hand over it. Oh god, he felt his fingers, touched his fingers, and he removed Philip’s hand from his hair.

‘Does she know?’ he asked again, putting Philip’s hand back to his side, and letting go.

He could hardly see Philip in the darkness. Philip had arranged them so that Illya was standing in that shaft of light. Philip could see everything of him, and he could see nothing.

‘Of course she doesn’t know, Illya,’ Philip said impatiently. ‘What do you think I should have said? I want my children to bear the names of the man I love? Should I have said that?’

‘No,’ Illya said very quietly. He didn’t know what to say. ‘Perhaps you should have given them their own names.’

‘I never stopped loving you, Eel,’ Philip said.

Philip had stabbed him. He had cracked open the flimsy shell and tossed it away and he had pushed a knife straight through Illya’s chest. He could hardly breathe. How he wanted to cling to Philip and kiss him and have Philip save his life.

‘ _ I _ did,’ he said baldly.

Philip stuttered. ‘You – did what?’

‘I did stop loving you,’ Illya said. Surely in the bright light from the window Philip could read that outrageous lie. Surely he could? But perhaps he didn’t want to. ‘I did stop loving you, Philip. You made your choice.’

Philip moved forward. Illya knew that move so well. His hand coming up to the back of Illya’s neck, the little stoop because Philip was over six feet tall, and Illya was small. He heard the slight parting of his lips. And Illya snapped up his hand and caught his wrist and said, ‘ _ No _ .’

He could feel Philip’s pulse under his fingers. It was racing. He hardly knew what his own pulse might be doing. He gently pushed Philip’s hand back down to his side again, and let go.

‘I looked for you,’ Philip said in a desperate tone. ‘I kept looking for you. I phoned so many universities, thinking you might be teaching, that the phone bill nearly dropped through the floor. I checked the research institutes. I even made enquiries in the Ukraine.’

‘I wasn’t there,’ Illya said, but he felt a little chill in his stomach at that thought, at the thought of Philip trying so hard to track him down. He had always held a little parcel of fear deep inside at what would happen if the authorities at home discovered what one of their brightest science graduates had done with another man at Cambridge. ‘I was in America, Philip. I have lived in America for a long time.’

‘ _ America _ ?’ Philip asked in a hiss of amazement. ‘ _ You _ , Illya?  _ You _ , in the consumerist capital of the world?’

‘I’ve made it my home,’ Illya said. He said those words without thinking, but he realised they were true. That was where everything he loved could be found. That was where Napoleon dwelt, in those tall city canyons, in that place of noise and yellow cabs and neon lights. Everything else was just nostalgia and memories.

‘Where in America, Illya?’ Philip asked almost eagerly, but Illya shook his head. He seemed to be growing colder and colder, a creeping cold that came from inside, not from the dark cool around him.

‘No. You don’t need to know that. You don’t have the right to know that, Philip. There is nothing between us any more. You have your wife and your children, and I have – ’

He stopped. He couldn’t say Napoleon’s name. The first time he spoke of his commitment to Napoleon it would not be to his erstwhile lover.

‘I have my life,’ he said instead. ‘It is  _ my  _ life, Philip, and it is not with you. If I wasn’t willing to be your dirty secret then I certainly won’t be now. I haven’t changed so much as to let me do that.’

Philip caught hold of his hands again, his fingers soft and strong and warm over Illya’s, pressing just a little too tightly.

‘Illya, I have missed you so much,’ he said. ‘Please...’

That cold space in Illya’s chest condensed. It seemed to collapse under its own gravity, making something as dense as a neutron star deep inside his chest, so cold it seemed to burn through him. He couldn’t take this. He couldn’t stand here under Philip’s possessive gaze. Suddenly he felt repulsed.

‘Go and find Elijah, Philip,’ he said softly, and he turned and walked out of the little room.

  


((O))

  


Outside felt like another world. He breathed in air as if he had surfaced from deep water. Everything was so wide and open and bright. There was so much warmth in the sun. And there was Napoleon, standing on his own now, watching that woman and her little girl as they walked off across the grass of the inner ward. That big square of grass reminded him of the quads at Cambridge. He gasped in air and Napoleon heard him and turned, and smiled.

‘Illya, I thought I’d lost you,’ he said, but his eyes still held that worried look.

Illya turned his eyes up to the top of the tower. Philip was up there now, and so was his little boy. They were both looking down. The boy was looking at his mother and sister across the ward. Philip was looking at Illya.

Illya reached out and took Napoleon’s hand and smiled. ‘You hadn’t lost me,’ he said. ‘I was always there.’

‘That was him, wasn’t it?’ Napoleon asked. ‘That was Philip?’

‘Yes,’ Illya said. ‘He always did like seaside towns.’

‘Well, his – er – his wife – ’ Napoleon said awkwardly.

‘Marian,’ Illya supplied.

‘Marian. Yes. She said he teaches at the university in Bangor. It’s only just over the straits. They live just a few miles away. In a seaside town, I suppose.’

‘Ah,’ Illya said.

It seemed ridiculous, weird even. Here Philip was, living in the kind of place he had loved to go with Illya, using Illya’s names every time he spoke to his children, living with – with that woman. With that poor woman.

‘There is an island,’ Illya said, lightly, oddly, ‘very far south, roughly midway between the continents of Africa and Antarctica. It’s cold, isolated, blasted by wind. It is called Marion Island.’

‘Oh,’ Napoleon said, as if he didn’t know what to make of that. ‘You’re a polymath, Illya. Did you know that?’

‘You’ve told me before,’ Illya shrugged. He wanted to laugh aloud at the thought of that cold, lonely island bearing that name, but the thought seemed so sad, too.

He pushed one hand into his pocket and slipped his fingers over a pebble in there. He had picked it up from the beach the other day, forgotten about it. There was no fossil inside, nothing special about it. It was just smooth and round, old without memory.

‘So,’ Napoleon said, ‘aside from giving me my daily geography lesson, what do you want to do?’

Illya smiled then. ‘I want to climb a tower. I want to share tea with you in a café. I want to enjoy our day together.’

They walked in silence across the grass, close but not touching. Illya was making for a tower on the other side of the castle, but he was thinking about Philip in that tower behind him. Ten years had made such a difference in him. That grey in his hair, the creases in his skin. He wondered fleetingly what ten years had done to the body under his soft academic’s clothes, and then his mind turned away as if of its own will. That was not something he had access to any more. Philip wasn’t his. Philip had not been his since that moment on the beach in Lyme Regis, and not because Philip had rejected him, but because he, Illya, had rejected Philip. Philip must be so changed now. Ten years of living with a woman that he could not love sexually; that must have changed him.

‘Illya,’ Napoleon said, nudging his arm.

He pointed to the entrance of another tower and Illya took point, looking in through the dark doorway, letting his eyes adjust to the change in light, then going into the cool, echoing space and tilting his head back to look at the steps. They wound up, a tight spiral of stone reaching up and out of sight. He could hear the echoing voices of other people, their feet clattering. Those sounds could be coming from another realm of reality. But they strengthened, came closer, and then an overweight man came around the curve of the central pillar, followed by two small boys, and then a woman with flushed cheeks and a laughing face.

‘Bit tight up there,’ the man said breathlessly, his voice clipped and northern.

So Illya smiled and let them go by, and when they had exited the tower Napoleon put his hand on Illya’s back. The touch felt so warm in the chill of the tower. It was so different to the way Philip had touched him. Philip had been proprietorial. It had been as if no time had passed and Philip thought he still had every right to Illya’s body. But Napoleon touched him lightly, warmly, as if his hand would stop Illya falling backwards but would never stop him walking away.

‘Come on, let’s see if we’re more fit than them,’ Napoleon said, and Illya laughed.

The steps wound up and his thighs started to protest because he had already climbed much taller castle towers today. He touched his hand for balance sometimes to the cool damp stone of the central pillar, sometimes to the graffiti-scratched wall.

‘Look, Napoleon. T. J., eighteen sixty nine,’ he said, tracing a finger over a very carefully carved piece of graffiti in the embrasure of the arrow slit window.

Napoleon reached around Illya to touch the carvings too. His hand brushed over Illya’s. His fingers felt so hot compared to the chill of the stone.

‘You think we should carve ours?’ he asked.

‘Napoleon, it’s a listed building!’ Illya objected, fabricating some of his horror because he loved the idea of his and Napoleon’s initials staying immutable in that stone for a hundred years or more.

He laid his hand over the top of Napoleon’s, fingers over fingers, fingertips on fingernails. He felt the warmth of Napoleon pressing against his back. The tower was utterly silent. Voices drifted from outside like the cries of ghosts, but there was no one in here, so he turned his head just enough to catch Napoleon’s lips with his in a fleeting, soft kiss. A spear of something, something very sharp and needful, raced like electricity from his throat to his groin, and was gone as suddenly as it had appeared. It left Illya feeling dazzled, as if the sun had suddenly moved round and flashed through that narrow window into his eyes.

‘Come up to the top of the tower,’ he said, tightening his fingers over Napoleon’s and then letting go, and Napoleon’s steady footsteps followed him all the way to the top, where the staircase opened suddenly into brilliant light, and they stepped out onto the circular platform. It was a funny, blunt, unfinished thing, a tower without crenellations, but Illya leant his arms on the stone and looked out across the Menai Straits at the rise of Snowdonia beyond. The mountains were blue-green, hazed out with distance, and beautiful. It seemed so still and quiet up here. Napoleon came to stand next to him and put his arm across Illya’s shoulders, and said, ‘You can’t imagine a single unpeaceful thing in the world from here, can you?’

Illya thought of bombs and wars, and men who came in the night and ripped people from their families. He thought of all of the anger and hatred and fear in the world. But Napoleon’s arm was around him, and Illya leant closer into his side and said, ‘No, Napoleon. You can’t.’

‘We’re all right, Illya, aren’t we?’ Napoleon asked.

The whole castle was behind them. Somewhere in that pile of stone Philip was still walking around, walking with his wife and his children in a whole mesh of deceit. The thought of it made Illya shudder. It made him want to hurry back down to the ground and walk out of here and never look back. He couldn’t imagine Napoleon ever doing something like that to him, ever asking him to efface himself, to live such a complete deception. He knew they wouldn’t stroll along Fifth Avenue hand in hand. When Napoleon took him to Coney Island they wouldn’t kiss on the Ferris wheel. Illya had no desire to be a reactionary or a revolutionary, so they would live carefully, under the laws that were laid down around them. But they would live together and Napoleon would never ask him to lie.

‘We’re all right,’ Illya replied at last. It was so good to be standing there under the shelter of Napoleon’s arm. Then he said in a rush, ‘I’m so glad to have you here, Napoleon. I’m sorry I’ve spent all this time being a stupid, brooding fool.’

‘No, no,’ Napoleon began to protest, but Illya shook his head roughly.

‘No, I have been. I’ve spent the first days of our holiday being a misery, being a love-sick child. I’ve felt like I’ve had Philip standing by me from the moment that we got off the train. But he’s not there any more, Napoleon. He’s gone away. I just have you, and that’s all that I want. Really, it’s all I could ever want. I don’t think I understood until now.’

Napoleon glanced across at him, then he grinned and cocked his head sideways and said, ‘Well, I did wonder what you saw in him that you didn’t see in me.’

Illya snorted. ‘You’re a preening cockerel, Napoleon. Is  _ that  _ what I see in you?’

For a moment the veneer was gone from Napoleon’s eyes. ‘I hope you see a little more.’

Illya smiled and reassured him, ‘Napoleon, there is so much beneath your surface that I’m almost afraid of getting lost in you. But I have such fun exploring.’

The grin was back. All the joy was back in Napoleon’s face. He rubbed his hand on Illya’s shoulder and Illya had to fight so hard not to turn and just kiss him right there on top of the tower. The future suddenly seemed so beautiful, so perfect. Suddenly he had lost all of his fear.

‘Let’s go, Napoleon,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and have that tea, and then go home.’

  


((O))

  


The sun was sinking into a liquid shimmer of silk gold and teal and darkest blue. The sea was flecked with little white caps where it ran in towards the shore, pushed into flurries by the wind. Seagulls twisted, hovered, arcing their wings against the up-draft before scrolling around to come back to the cliffs to roost.

They had left the E-type in the broad car park at the top of the Orme and walked back together along the quarried cliffs to where those slabs of fossils stood, alone enough to be able to walk hand in hand, the little space between their palms warmed and sheltered from the wind. It was a quiet, secret place, overlooked by no one but overlooking everything. They could see the estuary of the river where fresh waters slipped into the salt sea. They could see the dark swell of Puffin Island, the bright blink of the lighthouse not far off its steep sides, the long, low mass of Anglesey a black mystery on the horizon. To their left rose the start of the mountains of Snowdonia, burnished to bronze, and to their right was the gleaming silk of the sea, the broad sky, and the dying sun.

They sat on a cushion of grass, the picnic blanket around their shoulders protecting them from the constant wind. It was beautiful here. All of time stretched behind them, beneath them, back to an age of blind, crawling creatures, of amoebae, of cycads and ferns. They were a hair’s breadth against that deep, vast time, a millionth of a blink, the nanosecond start of a new breath. And time stretched before them, as strange and unknowable as what had gone before. In half a breath this moment would be gone and time would move on.

Illya was warm against Napoleon’s side. Napoleon was so warm against him. The blanket protected them from every chill as they watched the sun sinking into the sea.

‘You know, I think we should go,’ Napoleon said eventually, softly, his voice a murmur in Illya’s ear against the wind.

‘Yes. Before it gets so dark we’re lost up here,’ Illya agreed.

‘Would being lost up here be so bad, together?’ Napoleon asked.

‘I don’t want to break my ankle,’ Illya said rationally.

They stood, stretched, kissed. Napoleon folded the blanket. Illya opened his mouth to swallow the roaring wind.

‘Ready?’ Napoleon asked.

‘One moment.’

Illya slipped his hand into his pocket. He felt that ammonite there, the one he had plucked from the Lyme Regis beach, the one that had travelled with him across the world. He held it hard in his palm and felt it slowly seep his body’s heat, and then he pulled it from his pocket and opened his hand and let it cool in the wind. Napoleon didn’t ask him what he was doing. He didn’t say a word. Illya traced the contours with his fingertip one last time, then he reached out to the frail layers of stacked soil, fossils, rock, and roots, and he tucked the ammonite into a crevice for other curious hands to find.


End file.
